How far will Turkey go with its invasion of Syrian Kurdistan?

On day three of Turkey’s farcically named ‘Operation Peace Spring’ in northeast Syria, it remains unclear just how far Ankara is willing to go with its long-threatened invasion. 

As of writing, Turkey’s bombing of several urban centers and its displacement of approximately 70,000 civilians from their homes is yet to put it in violation of US President Donald Trump’s characteristically vague red line, according to an anonymous US official. 

The same official claimed Peace Spring is not even a large-scale operation at this stage, since Turkish forces are “really not engaged in great depth or in great numbers inside the border yet”. 

Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA) militias have so far captured around a dozen towns in the Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad area, according to reports. 

The groups fighting under the banner of the TFSA, many of them Islamist, displaced well over 100,000 Kurds from the northwest Syrian Kurdish region of Afrin in early 2018 when Turkey invaded the entire enclave without provocation. 

One possible reason why there has yet to be a large-scale ground incursion in the current operation is that Turkish jets and artillery are being use to sow panic in the cities to cause a major displacement of civilians before launching a concentrated ground offensive into Tal Abyad, known as Gire Spi to the Kurds. 

Tal Abyad is an Arab-majority area that was captured by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015. It is situated directly between the two primary Syrian Kurdish cantons, or regions, Kobane and Jazira. 

If Turkey focuses on capturing this region then it will have effectively severed direct routes between Kobane and Jazira. If this is the focus of Peace Spring then this operation may be another tactical phase in Turkey’s long-term strategic plan to carve-up and conquer Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava).

All of Turkey’s Syrian operations to date have had the same objective of dividing Rojava’s different regions and then invading them. Turkish officials invariably claimed that Turkey’s actions in Syria are solely directed at preventing a “terror corridor” from spreading along the length of the Syria-Turkey border, hence a contiguous Rojava. 

In August 2016, Turkey launched its first incursion into Syria in Operation Euphrates Shield. 

Euphrates Shield saw the Turkish Army and the TFSA seize a large swath of the northwest Syrian border territory between Kobane and Afrin from ISIS. 

The operation was launched mere days after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-Arab alliance of which the YPG forms the backbone, captured the city of Manbij on the west bank of the Euphrates River from ISIS after costly summer-long offensive. 

Turkey objective was clearly one of ensuring that Rojava’s primary regions east of the Euphrates would not be linked overland to Afrin. 

Then, in January 2018, Turkey outright invaded Afrin, in the ironically named Operation Olive Branch, and began resettling displaced Syrian Arabs in vacated Kurdish homes in a clear bid to radically alter that region’s long-established Kurdish-majority demographic. 

Today, seizing Tal Abyad will place Turkish forces and their proxies directly between Kobane and Jazira. Then, in any follow-up operation, Turkey can more easily focus on invading either Kobane or Jazira since its forces on the ground can more easily encircle and besiege population centers in these cantons. 

Whatever the overall plan, in the coming days Turkey will likely try and create as many facts on the ground as it can in short order before any ceasefire is imposed by the US or it is pressured by regional powers to cease its onslaught. 

This is why taking over Tal Abyad first would make sense if there is going to be a major ground phase in this operation in the coming days. 

“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is playing a cat and mouse game with the SDF right now,” Nicholas Heras, the Middle East Security Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Rudaw English. 

“Contrary to expectations, the Turkish military and its Syrian rebel proxies are not pushing hard to capture the so-called Tal Abyad Pocket, which is where Turkey was supposed to penetrate the deepest under the security mechanism agreed to between the United States and Turkey,” he said. 

“Erdogan will want to eventually move to take significant territory away from the SDF, to create facts on the ground.” 

Heras noted that Turkey is in an “expanding mode” in Syria at present and that “it is dubious whether the Trump administration is prepared for all the contingencies, especially if the SDF is no longer able to carry out the counter-ISIS campaign”.

While these factors remain uncertain, what is clear is that “returning to the status quo before Turkey launched its operation will be impossible”.