A day before the long-awaited March 30 visit of new US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Ankara, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim dramatically announced that Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkey's military intervention in northern Syria, had “successfully” come to a close. A precursory postmortem of the vaunted military campaign raises a number of questions, including what caused its termination and why it was not reported immediately? The answers lead one to wonder what comes next.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had said after al-Bab's capture in late February from the Islamic State (IS) that the operation would continue on to its next target, Manbij, and after that to Raqqa. Not only Cavusoglu, but the ultimate decision-maker on Turkey's Syria policy, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also repeatedly stated Turkey’s intention of removing the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and People’s Protection Units (YPG) from Manbij and replacing the SDF as Washington's main ally in the campaign to capture Raqqa.

Those objectives have not been achieved. One might therefore logically conclude that Operation Euphrates Shield ended rather unsuccessfully. Of additional note, it took the Turkish military and its Free Syrian Army allies more than three months and a relatively high number of casualties to capture al-Bab, the southernmost point of Syrian territory that Turkey controls, some 18 miles south of the Turkish border.

The big question is why did it take Ankara a month after al-Bab's capture to declare the “successful” end of Operation Euphrates Shield? The answer is because capturing al-Bab was not Turkey's real or ultimate aim. The actual goal was to push the Kurdish military presence west of the Euphrates and end US military cooperation with the Kurds.