US Syria pullout may be more than Turkey asked for
The haste with which President Donald Trump appears to be dumping the Americans’ Syrian Kurdish allies is not necessarily what Turkey’s president had hoped for and will likely pose new problems for Ankara.
As President Donald Trump’s bombshell decision to withdraw all US forces from Syria begins to sink in, for Ankara, the adage “be careful what you wish for, you might get it” may well be flitting through official minds.
Amid all the self-congratulatory chest-thumping, the haste with which Trump appears to be dumping the United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies is not necessarily what Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had banked on.
Turkey's threats to attack the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) east of the Euphrates River, where US forces are based, were calculated to get the Pentagon to scotch its alliance with the Kurds, not for US forces to leave en masse and certainly not so quickly. Rather, Turkey wanted the US-led coalition to preside over the insertion of its own Arab proxies, particularly in Arab-majority towns such as Raqqa, Tell Abyad and Manbij, at the expense of the YPG and its Arab partners.
With US military personnel reportedly slated to leave within three months (the evacuation of US civilians has already begun), it remains unclear what sort of security arrangements the Americans will leave in place. What will become of the Kurdish and Arab Syrian Democratic Forces, the 60,000-strong YPG-led force that led the coalition’s ground war against the Islamic State? And most critically for Ankara, what will departing US special forces do about the weapons given to the YPG?
