According to the Daily Sabah: “The Turkish military has recently increased its deployment near the Syrian border, including heavy weaponry, armored vehicles and tanks, as it prepares for an imminent offensive against the PKK terror group’s Syrian branch the People’s Protection Units (YPG).”
The Washington Post in turn reported: “The Trump administration has launched a last-ditch effort to head off a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria that it expects will come within the next two weeks. With tens of thousands of Turkish troops massed near the border, a high-level Defense Department delegation plans to present what US officials describe as a final offer to address Turkey’s concerns at a meeting Monday in Ankara.”
Ankara is demanding a “safe zone” some 20-25 miles deep, along the whole of the border. This would place almost all of the heavily populated areas of northeastern Syria, currently governed by the Kurdish-led and PKK-linked Democratic Union Party (PYD), under Turkish control.
Towns such as Qamishly (the capital of the region), Kobane (in which the Kurds fought so valiantly to break the Islamic State’s momentum in 2014), Tal Abyad, Ras al-Ayin (Sere Kaniye in Kurdish), Al Malikiya and other major urban hubs of the area all lie within 25 miles of the Turkish border.
The Americans are proposing an alternative safe zone nine miles deep and 87 miles long from which Kurdish fighters would be withdrawn. Turkey has rejected this proposal, and the reason is simple: Turkey does not need a safe zone on Syrian territory. The Syrian-Turkish border is already one of the most fortified and heavily patrolled borders in the world. A huge barbed wire fence with guard posts every few hundred meters stretches the length of the border, and the flat land the border runs along is heavily mined.
Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, almost nothing of any significance could be smuggled across the northeastern Turkish-Syrian border. When jihadis wanted to cross from Turkey into this area, they did so with the connivance of Turkish authorities. Meanwhile, Kurds and others had to find alternative routes across from elsewhere in Syria and Iraq.
This was the case in 2014 when the town of Kobane – straddling the border itself – lay under ISIS siege. Ankara’s refusal to do anything about the jihadis attacking Kobane right on Turkey’s border is what led the Obama administration to establish its relationship with the PYD – a relationship that eventually led to the liberation of Raqqa and all other ISIS territories in Syria.
Despite Turkish propaganda to the contrary, the Turkish-Syria border in the northeast of Syria remains a good deal calmer and violence free than the Gaza-Israel or Lebanon-Israel border. What Turkey actually wants in the area is therefore not a safe zone but the complete elimination of the Kurdish-led de facto autonomous cantons and a place to resettle the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.
In other words, Ankara wishes to turn the cantons of Kobane and Jazira into another Afrin. Turkey invaded Afrin in January of 2018, ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Kurds from the area and resettling Arabs and Turkmen from other parts of Syria in their place – including virulently jihadist groups acting as Ankara’s proxies.
Washington therefore faces a simpler choice than it may realize. Washington can acquiesce to the undoing of all the gains it made in Syria. Allowing Turkey into this area would devastate the Kurdish-led forces that undid the “Islamic State” and allow Kobane and Jazira to become like today’s Afrin and Idlib provinces – overrun by jihadi groups under Turkish supervision.
The result would allow for either the return of ISIS or its replacement by al Qaeda's Syrian wing of Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly the al-Nusra front).
Washington, assuming it does not desire such an outcome, may alternately say ‘no’ to Turkey in very clear, unambiguous terms. Anything else invites trouble. A Congressionally-approved no-fly zone over Kobane and Jazira would be sufficient, while a behind-closed-doors American promise to make good on economic sanctions (already earned from Ankara’s purchase of Russian S-400 missile systems) would add to Ankara’s disincentives. At the same time, Washington would continue its commitment to keep the PYD from troubling Turkey over the border.
Turkey might not like the long-term prospect of a PKK-linked Syrian Kurdish-led autonomous region on its border, but plenty of states have learned to live with much worse. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza actually launch regular attacks on Israel from their enclaves, which is hardly the case for Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.
Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which Turkey has good relations with, also remain openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The PYD in Syria in contrast insists it only wants to be left alone. Even the PKK maintains it does not want to separate Kurdish areas from Turkey or destroy the Turkish state, instead asking for a negotiated peace that would allow it to come down from the mountains.
A true friend of Turkey should therefore push Ankara to moderate its goals, compromise, and finally negotiate an end to its problems.
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David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East. |
