When Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to attack the United States’ Kurdish allies in northeastern Syria, the US-led coalition would often respond by dispatching a mobile patrol prominently displaying the US flag within sight of Turkish troops across border. On Sunday, Turkish and US troops conducted their first joint ground patrol in and around Tell Abyad, a mainly Arab town that until its 2015 capture by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) served as a critical gateway for thousands of foreign jihadist fighters flowing into Syria via Turkey.
The exercise marks the first time Turkish troops crossed into the US-protected and Kurdish-administered zone in northeastern Syria to the east of the Euphrates River and is part of ongoing efforts between Turkey and the United States to establish a so-called security mechanism that many Syrian Kurds worry may torpedo their own.