President Trump announced on Monday that he will pull U.S. troops from northern Syria. Our mission in the region is complete, he claimed: ISIS has been defeated, and some sort of stability has been reached. Trump is partly correct. Our peacekeeping presence in northern Syria has prevented the Islamic State’s rebirth and the ISIS caliphate has been largely reduced to rubble.
There’s just one problem: Trump is trusting Turkish President Recep Tayyipp Erdoğan to fill the U.S. void and keep the peace.
Not only does Erdoğan hate the Kurds, our allies who were instrumental in our fight against ISIS, the Turkish president has a long and troubling history of turning a blind eye to terrorism in the Middle East.
Indeed, it was in part because of Turkey’s negligence that ISIS was able to wage war in Syria. Turkish forces turned a blind eye to ISIS fighters flowing across Turkey’s borders, and at times bragged about the assistance they had received in Turkey. The Turkish intelligence service, MIT, has also been accused of providing resources to ISIS, according to the New York Post. In 2016, WikiLeaks published an archive of nearly 58,000 emails that confirmed reports that Erdoğan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, helped ISIS steal oil from Syria and Iraq.
Albayrak has continued to deny the WikiLeaks report, and Erdoğan has decried the allegations of complicity with ISIS as a “smear campaign” and “systematic attack on Turkey’s International reputation.”
The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. A report conducted by Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights lists numerous reports detailing troubling connections between ISIS and Turkey. Here are a few examples:
- In 2014, an ISIS commander told the Washington Post that “most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war come via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.”
- Top Turkish officials confirmed in statements that trucks bound for Syria were loaded with weapons, but were sidelined by MIT agents at Turkish checkpoints. The MIT agents kept Turkish inspectors form looking inside the trucks’ cargo.
- Foreign militants who joined ISIS referred to the Turkish border as the “Gateway to Jihad” because Turkish soldiers either accepted bribes or did nothing at all, according to the Daily Mail.
- A senior Egyptian official confirmed in 2014 the MIT was indeed passing satellite imagery to ISIS fighters.
- Jordanian intelligence reported Turkey had even trained ISIS militants on several occasions.
These reports should be taken seriously. Erdoğan’s word is not enough, and Trump’s red lines might not be enough to keep him at bay.
