US faces uphill battle recouping arms from Syrian Kurds
As the fight against the Islamic State winds down, the Donald Trump administration says it plans to get back the weapons it loaned to Kurdish troops opposed by Turkey.
The Donald Trump administration plans to ask Kurdish fighters in Syria to return US weapons loaned for the fight against the Islamic State (IS), but the administration is not ending all support despite growing pressure from NATO ally Turkey.
The message from White House and Pentagon officials on Monday appeared to walk back assertions from Turkey’s top diplomat that Trump had promised to cease support to Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Turkey considers the group’s Kurdish faction, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), to be a terrorist group.
“Once we started winning the campaign against [IS], the plan and part of the process is to always wind down support for certain groups,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a briefing on Monday. “Now that we're continuing to crush the physical caliphate … we're in a position to stop providing military equipment to certain groups. But that doesn't mean stopping all support of those individual groups.”
One US official told Al-Monitor that the Pentagon never sought to provide permanent arms to YPG factions of the SDF, but rather loaned them out for the duration of the conflict against IS in Syria. Throughout the operation, the Pentagon declined to put timelines on the monthslong battles to take back control of Raqqa and other Syrian towns, which proceeded more quickly than anticipated.
