Graphic by Alesandra Bell | Mercury Staff
In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
President Trump virtually single-handedly committed to pulling out 1,000 troops
from Syria and gave the go-ahead for Turkey’s military to enter an area that is
under the control of Washington’s Kurdish allies.
The Kurds are a stateless ethnic group of Western Asia. In
the northeast of Syria, they make up an overwhelming majority of the Syrian
Democratic Forces, a critical actor in the fight against ISIS. Erdoğan,
however, considers the Kurds an existential threat to Turkey because of the
group’s historical ties to the PKK, an officially recognized terrorist group,
but more importantly because of his fear of an independent Kurdish state on
Turkey’s southern border. Erdoğan wants to not only expand the “buffer zone”
between the Kurds and his country by pushing them further into Syria in order
to prevent an influx of Syrian refugees but also to prevent Turkish Kurds from
mobilizing.
The US, on the other hand, saw the Kurds as a necessary ally
against the presence of ISIS in Syria and provided not just military support
starting in the Obama administration, but also arms and airstrike assistance by
the Trump administration in 2017. After the fall of Raqqa in 2017, when ISIS
lost its “capital” to Kurdish SDF forces, the alliance became less
strategically critical for President Trump. On Oct. 13 — one day after Turkish
forces attacked Kurdish civilians — Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced
that the US was committed to removing all 1,000 American troops from
northeastern Syria.
This move can’t even be considered unilateral — by acting
against the advice of his own national security staff and the wishes of his own
party, Trump is playing right into the hands of the Erdoğan-Putin duo. Along
with opening up a vacuum that the Russian-supported Turkish military is already
using to establish a buffer zone, Trump raised tariffs against Turkey and
threatened more economic consequences if Erdoğan did anything “off-limits.”
“Off-limits” seems like a standard that is harder and harder
to reach, however, as the Turkish military is increasingly aggressive while
President Trump turns a blind eye to blatant abuses. At his rally in Dallas on
Oct. 17, Trump said it was good to let the Turks attack the Kurds, saying,
“Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids.”
Maybe it’s just me, but when I got into fights as a kid, I
don’t remember anyone being raped and then stoned to death. That’s what the
Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sharqiya fighters did to Kurdish politician Hevrin
Khalaf.
According to Amnesty International, Erdoğan’s military and
mercenaries have committed war crimes and “displayed a shameful disregard for
civilian life.” Witness testimonies, video footage and medical reports provided
evidence of deadly attacks, in which Turkish authorities claim to have taken 18
civilian lives and injured 150 more in the first four days of attacks. The
Kurdish-led administration said that at least 218 civilians, including 18
children, have been killed in the first six days of attacks.
The Turkish government made concessions as a signal of their
official commitment to a “peaceful resolution,” but they are laughably empty.
Erdoğan’s promise is to officially demilitarize in the region until the Kurds
back out of it. In reality, the way that the Kurds leave is through being
continued to be violently forced deeper into Syria by Turkish-backed fighters
in the region. This means that war crimes and other serious human rights
violations will continue without technically violating the terms of the
agreement, thus facing no additional penalty from the United States.
American sanctions on Turkey are a slap on the wrist when
compared to how much removing troops from Syria supports Erdoğan — and when
Sen. Lindsay Graham and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are on the same page
about an issue, it’s bad. The problem is, even in the unlikely scenario in
which President Trump completely reverses his stance, the can of worms that is
an American green light for a military incursion is incredibly difficult to
close back up.