Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to take military action if Turkish troops are not permitted to control the zone.
“Turkey has no time and patience and it wants [the] safe-zone to be built along eastern Euphrates line, along Syria, as soon as possible,” Erdogan declared on August 31.
“If our soldiers do not control the region within a few weeks, we will put our own operation plan into effect.”
If the Turkish president’s statement is a genuine threat of unilateral military action in northeast Syria in the near future – rather than rhetorical bombast directed at his supporters in Turkey – then the United States needs to establish clear red-lines to deter Turkey.
Early in August, the US scrambled to dissuade Turkey from launching what appeared to be an imminent ground attack on northeast Syria against the US-allied Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the larger Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) anti-Islamic State (ISIS) coalition.
Turkey amassed an enormous force of armor, artillery, and troops along its southern frontier directed at the lightly-armed SDF/YPG forces.
To stave off any potential attack the US promised to rapidly implement the safe zone with Turkey – which was initially proposed more than eight months ago.
US and Turkish military officials set up a joint operations centre inside Turkey, situated approximately 50 km from the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane, to establish and manage the zone.
Less than a month later Turkey can already see some significant progress on the ground in northeast Syria. The YPG has destroyed trenches and other fortifications near the border – which were purely defensive to begin with – and removed heavy weapons.
According to Middle East Eye, Turkey has agreed to the 15 km-deep safe zone offered by the US in which there will be no YPG presence.
While this is substantially smaller than the 32 km zone previously discussed, it is still a very significant concession for the YPG to make since most of the Syrian Kurdish population centres are situated right on the border with Turkey.
As outlined in this space before, the safe zone has nothing in reality to do with Turkey’s national security given the self-evident fact that the YPG poses no serious military threat to Turkey. Furthermore, the group never attacked Turkey even though Turkey invaded the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin in early 2018 without provocation.
The SDF has also insisted that the safe zone should extend all along the border with Turkey “to secure long-lasting peace and permanently negate Turkish threats”.
The only thing these forces oppose is a permanent Turkish military presence in northeast Syria. SDF spokesperson Mustafa Bali recently stated there will be no such presence under the agreement, including observation posts like the ones the Turkish Army operate in Syria’s northwest Idlib province.
Instead, he said, the Turkish military will have “infrequent” joint patrols with the Americans inside the zone to confirm that the SDF/YPG is sticking to its end of the bargain.
This is a good deal for Ankara since it would effectively make the Syrian side of the border a verifiable demilitarized zone.
It is also much better than the 1998 Adana Agreement between Ankara and Damascus which, under certain circumstances, gave Turkey authorization to pursue Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters 5 km into Syria.
Last January, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested to Erdogan that this deal could be reactivated as an alternative to the then-proposed 32 km deep safe zone with the Americans.
Erdogan said he liked Putin’s idea.
Today, on the other hand, Erdogan is declaring he will take unilateral military action in northeast Syria if Turkish troops are not permitted to essentially occupy large swathes of the region – despite the fact that concrete steps are already being taken to demilitarize it.
This once again demonstrates that Turkey’s threats against northeast Syria have nothing to do with safeguarding its own security.
Last January when Trump announced the safe zone he also warned that the US would “devastate Turkey economically” if it attacked the SDF/YPG.
He can justifiably put the threat of severe sanctions back on the table to deter Ankara from taking any unilateral military action in northeast Syria.
In other words, the United States needs to once again demonstrate to Turkey that it has a lot to gain through the coordinated establishment of a safe zone in northeast Syria and a lot to lose through more aggression.
