Turkey has never made any secret of its hatred of Brett McGurk, the prominent former State Department official who resigned in protest last month over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out US troops from northeastern Syria.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had publicly called on Washington to sack the man. A Turkish prosecutor weighed a criminal complaint calling for his arrest on terror charges. In private conversations lubricated with expensive Scotch, Turkish officials wished him an even darker fate. In Ankara’s eyes, McGurk was the main architect of the US-led coalition’s alliance with Turkey’s enemy, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), in the battle against the Islamic State.
