How to read Trump’s blow to Turkey on Syrian Kurds
What motivated the United States' decision to directly arm Syrian Kurdish forces?
There should be no doubt that President Donald Trump’s approval of a plan to directly arm Kurdish forces in Syria is a severe, devastating blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s obstinate efforts to undermine the relationship of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party and the People's Protection Units (YPG) with Washington.
The decision is an additional inflammatory step in the already strained US-Turkey relations emanating from divergences over Syria. The relationship between the two NATO allies was dislocated during President Barack Obama's administration, primarily due to divergences on Washington’s approach to the Kurds in Syria. Yet even Obama had not gone the extra mile to anger Erdogan (or the Turks) by giving approval to directly arm the YPG. In mid-October 2014, when the United States provided air support to the besieged Kurds in Kobani, the move was recorded as a milestone in the problematic relations between the United States, Turkey and the Kurds.
From the official Turkish viewpoint, that air support was seen — and not wrongly — as a “political statement,” as much as military and humanitarian assistance to thousands of people desperately struggling to survive under Islamic State (IS) siege following the capture of Mosul and Raqqa. The air support had made Turkey’s ally — the United States — strange bedfellows with the alleged branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Syria, the PYD/YPG.
Since then, rifts have developed between Ankara and Washington that culminated in Erdogan’s courting Trump, hoping that with him the prospects of Turkish-American relations on Syria — mainly on the issue of Syrian Kurds — would be different than those of the Obama era.
