Turkish invasion has left Ankara weak and on the verge of economic meltdown

The Kurds’ deal with the Assad regime means that the future of Turkey’s operation is dependent on the say-so of Moscow, not Washington

THE NATIONAL

Ankara’s attempt to carve out a so-called safe zone deep inside Kurdish-held territory in north-east Syria has left Turkey alone, strategically weak and on the precipice of an economic meltdown. Even last week’s US-brokered truce was no victory for Turkey’s firebrand president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Sure, under the terms of the ceasefire, the White House agreed to practically everything Ankara wanted. US President Donald Trump froze sanctions and accepted Ankara’s demand for a safe zone and its calls for forces from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to retreat. More ominously, there was nothing said about the hundreds of thousands of Kurds who fled the area, nor of Turkey’s odious intention to resettle millions of Arab Syrian refugees in the proposed safe zone – such a deliberate policy of demographic tampering being tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Instead, Mr Trump declared the Kurds were “no angels”. By yesterday, four days into the ceasefire, Kurdish troops had withdrawn entirely from the key border town of Ras Al Ain in north-eastern Syria.

The so-called truce, agreed on Thursday, was the second time that Mr Trump sold out the Kurds. The first occasion was his announcement to pull out US forces from Syria in the first place, a de facto green light for the Turkish invasion that prompted the truce.

But all Mr Erdogan and his ministers got in reality was a memo hardly worth the paper it was printed on. For one, fighting still continues and the truce has no enforcement mechanism. Meanwhile, the YPG’s deal with the Assad regime means that the future of Turkey’s operation is dependent on the say-so of Moscow, not Washington.

For now, Turkey is in Donald Trump’s good books, but the US president is highly unreliable. He is prone to meltdowns and has threatened to destroy the Turkish economy on more than one occasion

Ankara might be loathe to admit it but its borders were a lot safer before the operation. The presence of US forces provided a buffer between Washington’s two allies, Turkey and the YPG. It was for the most part a quiet border. Now Turkey has a fully equipped, Russian-backed Syrian military on its doorstep protecting the battle-hardened YPG and seething at Turkey’s bombardments and the alleged abuses committed by Turkey’s ragtag band of militant Islamists, such as allegations Turkish-backed troops have been using white phosphorus to attack civilians, a possible war crime.

And even if Turkish forces manage to gain a little bit more territory with the YPG agreeing to withdraw, it would still fall far short of the 480-kilometre-long buffer zone Ankara intended. Turkey’s only hope is that when Mr Erdogan meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi tomorrow, he might gain a few concessions on the size of the safe zone. But that would involve a quid pro quo, such as a Turkish withdrawal from Idlib, and the “safe zone” could prove to be more of a deathtrap for Turkish forces and its proxies, who might face hit-and-run attacks by the YPG as they did in Afrin. Either way, Turkey’s Syria policy is worse off now than it was before.

Meanwhile, Turkey has little international support. Ankara’s only friends in the Middle East are Iran and Qatar. Despite Mr Erdogan’s threat to send millions of Syrian refugees to Europe, the European Union called Turkey’s bluff. Brussels issued an unequivocal condemnation of Turkey’s operation and called for the suspension of arms exports. Germany, France, Norway, Finland and Sweden have already done so. To make matters worse, European sanctions loom because of Turkey’s drilling off the coast of Cyprus.

Another blow to Turkey is the position of the UK. Until now, Westminster was Turkey’s best ally in the West. Trade was flowing, diplomatic visits were frequent and London was the first European country to show solidarity with Turkey after the 2016 coup attempt, even while Mr Erdogan was purging his critics. However, in the wake of Turkey’s onslaught on the Kurds, Westminster announced that it would review arms licences and freeze future exports. The utility of the involvement of BAE Systems and Rolls Royce in developing Turkey’s domestic TF-X fighter jet might also soon come into question.

For now, at least, Turkey is in Mr Trump’s good books. But the US president is highly unreliable. He is prone to meltdowns and has threatened to destroy the Turkish economy on more than one occasion. He also faces the very real possibility of impeachment. Mr Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds and Turkey’s invasion is resented by the Pentagon, the State Department, Congress and even Mr Trump’s own Republican Party for diminishing US influence, empowering Iran and Russia, and risking the resurgence of ISIS. Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, even penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, publicly calling Mr Trump’s Syria pullout a “strategic nightmare”.

Congress looks set to pass more sanctions against Turkey for the incursion. The US treasury could soon dish out a hefty billion-dollar fine against the Turkish state-owned Halkbank for violating Iranian sanctions, and heavy penalties still loom under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act for Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 defence system. It is unlikely Mr Erdogan will understand that the US president’s hands are effectively tied on such matters as sanctions cripple the Turkish economy.

Meanwhile, reports of human rights abuses and possible war crimes by Turkish forces and the merciless militias it backs are not helping Ankara’s cause. Neither does the fact that Turkey’s resettlement policy is really an attempt to ethnically cleanse the region of its Kurdish majority. An ally capable of committing such outrages is hardly an ally for Nato or the West at all.

Not only has this latest operation brought Turkey few strategic gains but it has highlighted the extent to which Ankara has burned its diplomatic bridges. In effect, Turkey has transformed itself from being a pivotal member of Nato to little more than a minor piece on Russia’s strategic chessboard.

Simon Waldman is an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London

Updated: October 21, 2019 05:00 PM

October 22, 2019 | 5 Comments »

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  2. I wonder if it is possible that Trump wants the Kurds to align with ISIS in order to defeat the Shiites and destroy the land-bridge from Iran to Lebanon via Syria and Iraq?

  3. How is Trump who claims he hates Islamist terrorists is allowing Erodgan to try and ethnically cleanse the Kurds, the USA allies who lost 11,000 fighters in the joint run operation to get rid of the IS Caliphate. Erodgan aided ISIS and allowed the caliphate to form. Erodgan a self declared Muslim Brotherhood leader who has other terrorists as allies Hamas and Syrian Sunni Islamists’.

    When the Dust Settles in Syria…

    by Fiamma Nirenstein / JNS.org

    To speak about Kurds has suddenly become a cry in favor of human rights and self-determination by the Western press, and rightly so: The assault they are suffering is lethal and may become genocidal. More frightening is that it is being perpetrated by the Turks, who are already stained by the Armenian genocide and led by a leader who considers himself an almighty sultan. And it’s really odd that Europe is only now discovering who he really is.

    How can this be? Didn’t Europe know that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an during these last 16 years in power has been possessed by a vicious fundamentalist Islamic and imperialist dream, repeatedly displayed unprecedented arrogance (he has closed newspapers and thrown more than 150,000 dissidents in prison), and expressed extreme ideas that have systematically dismantled the precious Kemalist heritage that once made Turkey the hope of a bridge between the Islamic world and the West? Didn’t Europe see that he inundated the world with slogans and antisemitic standpoints corroborated by his friendship with Hamas? That he supported former Egypt President Mohammad Morsi as leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — a man he praised being himself the greatest Muslim Brotherhood politician in office? Is it coincidence that Erdo?an allowed the passage from his country of thousands of Islamic fundamentalists in possession of whatever passport to boost ISIS, which many claim he supported through trade and furnished with weapons?

    Continue article at https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/20/when-the-dust-settles-in-syria/

  5. Fiamma Nirenstein, a former member of the Italian parliament and later an Israeli Ambassidor to Italy, weighs in on the Syrian-Turkish-Kurdish morass in the Algemeiner. She thinks that Erdogan and his regime are very dangerous and evil jihadists and are likely to perpetrate massacres in the Kurdish region, and support ISIS. However, she doesn’t think the U.S. is to blame for this tragedy, and thinks that the Erdogan regime is in trouble with its own people, Russia and Iran as well as the Uniteded States. An excerpt from Nirenstein’s analysis follows:

    In chorus, the international media argue that Trump’s withdrawal marks a total radical strategic change in the structure of power and American influence in the region, and that those who will gain are first and foremost Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar Assad. But we must remember that the Alawite power, since its beginning, has always leaned on Russia to dominate the country. In fact, this duo is nothing new. And that the Turks and Assad have a relationship of continuous clash-rapprochement is equally well-known: for now, instead, the fact that Assad has established a relationship with the Kurds means that the Russians tend towards the status quo without Turkish domination. As for Iran, the non-fortuitous coincidence of the beginning of Turkish hostilities with a powerful exercise along the same border by the Iranian army tells us that Tehran shows up to signal that it doesn’t like the excess of a Sunni presence in northeast Syria, and this contrasts not just a little with the photo diffused everywhere during the summit between Erdo?an, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which took place this past September in Ankara. At this moment, the trio no longer works together, and Russia will be the “tightrope walker” between the Sunni and Shi’ite powers that seemed momentarily calmed.

    The United States has — and not just with Trump, as demonstrated by former President Barack Obama’s approach vis-à-vis Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the famous failure to enforce the “red line” against Assad — left the Middle East numerous times under several American presidents. But then it, as Politico notes, returned for better or worse: Jimmy Carter with the battles at the Iranian embassy; ??Ronald Reagan with the explosion of the barracks and the massacre of soldiers at the hands of the Hezbollah in Beirut; and George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq.

    Now the field correspondents write that a mass of Arab militias armed by the Turks commit atrocities on the Kurdish population with the cry of “Allahu Akbar,” against kafirs (infidels). This outbreak of Islamic fundamentalism can have great repercussions that certainly won’t leave anyone indifferent, including Trump. We will see. And for Israel, which certainly cannot afford to move armed troops considering all the problems it currently faces on its borders, we can still bet on the fact that its standing on the side of the Kurds will mean something.

    It’s not the fact that America no longer wants to stay on that border that has changed things, but the war cry of Islamic fundamentalism that resounds again and again the Middle East. Perhaps Erdo?an, with Sunni and regal pride, lacks a complete vision of what he has unleashed.

    Iran certainly doesn’t like this Sunni invasion and neither do the Alawis. Russia is in the middle. America is far away, but vigilant. And Europe, as usual, is absent.