It’s a trick for which the State Department constantly falls: Adversaries feign grievance in order to win concessions. It is also a strategy Turkey has mastered. Rather than be held to account for its support for al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, for turning a blind eye to the flow of foreign fighters across its border, and for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s own family profiting off the Islamic State oil trade, U.S. diplomats have treated with credulousness supposed Turkish fears about Kurdish terrorism originating in Syria, never mind that Turkish authorities have been unable to present any intelligence showing Kurdish terrorism originating from the Kurdish-controlled Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Nevertheless, U.S. Special Envoy James Jeffrey and his team have acquiesced to Turkish bluster and have agreed, at least preliminarily, to a Turkish demand for a buffer zone, although the details remain unclear. The Kurds, who currently oversee Syria’s most peaceful and secure region, are loath to trust American interlocutors when they say that Turkish forces entering their region will abide by carefully negotiated redlines. First, there is the precedent of Afrin, a district in Syria that the Turkish Army entered and proceeded to ethnically cleanse, even bulldozing cemeteries, knocking down statues, and insisting that women veil and utilize Arabic names.
