BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Biden administration officials are sharpening their language towards NATO-ally Turkey as they try to dissuade Turkish President Recep Erdogan from launching a bloody and destabilizing ground offensive against US-allied Kurdish forces in neighboring Syria to start.
Since November 20, a week earlier, after six people were killed in a bomb attack in Istanbul that Turkey blamed without evidence on the US and its Kurdish allies in Syria, Turkey has launched cross-border airstrikes, rockets and grenades on US and Kurdish countries fired. patrolled areas of Syria leaving Kurdish funeral processions in their wake, burying dozens of dead.
Some criticized the initially muted US response to the near-daily Turkish bombardment – a widespread call for “de-escalation” – as giving the US the green light for more. With Erdogan not giving in to his threat of escalation, the US began speaking more forcefully.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called his Turkish counterpart on Wednesday to express “strong opposition” to a new Turkish military operation in northern Syria.
And National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Friday made one of the first specific government mentions about the impact of Turkey’s strikes on the Kurdish militia, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is working with the United States against the militants intercepted in the north Islamic State cooperates Syria.
How successfully the United States deals with Erdogan’s threat to deploy troops against America’s Kurdish partners in the coming weeks will have implications for global security concerns far from this isolated corner of Syria.
This applies in particular to the Ukraine conflict. The Biden administration is eager to see Erdogan’s cooperation with other NATO partners in fighting Russia, particularly when it comes to persuading Turkey to drop its objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
But giving Turkey a free hand to attack the Syrian Kurds in hopes of securing Erdogan’s cooperation within NATO would itself have major security implications.
US forces on Friday halted joint military patrols with Kurdish forces in northern Syria to counter Islamic State extremists as the Kurds focus on defending against Turkish air and artillery strikes and a possible ground invasion.
Since 2015, Syrian Kurdish forces have worked with the few hundred forces the US has in place there, reclaiming areas from Islamic State and then arresting thousands of Islamic State fighters and their families and fighting remaining Islamic State fighters. On Saturday, the US and Kurds resumed limited patrols at one of the detention centers.
“ISIS is the forgotten history for the world and the United States because of the focus on Ukraine,” said Omer Taspinar, an expert on Turkey and European security at the Brookings Institution and the National War College. ISIS is a widely used acronym for Islamic State.
“What would tragically revive Western support for the Kurds… would be another ISIS terrorist attack, God forbid, in Europe or in the United States, which will remind people that we did not, in fact, defeat ISIS,” Taspinar said.
Turkey says the Syrian Kurds are allied to a nearly four-decade-long Kurdish PKK insurgency in southeastern Turkey that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides. The United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies deny any attacks in Turkey.
US Central Command and many in Congress are hailing the Syrian Kurds as brave comrades. Central Command in July angered Turkey by tweeting condolences for a Syrian Kurdish deputy commander and two other militants killed in a drone strike blamed on Turkey.
In 2019, a public outcry from his Republican compatriots and many others killed a plan by President Donald Trump, which he announced after a phone call with Erdogan, to move US troops out of the way to stop an expected Turkish attack on Kurdish allies in Syria to prevent.
The then presidential candidate Joe Biden was also outraged.
“The Kurds were instrumental in helping us defeat ISIS – and too many lost their lives. Now President Trump has abandoned them. It’s shameful,” Biden tweeted at the time.
The measured US response now – even after hitting some Turkish attacks near locations where US forces are stationed – reflects the significant strategic role Turkey plays as a NATO member in the alliance’s efforts, Russia counteract in Europe. The State Department and USAID did not immediately answer questions about whether the Turkish strikes had hampered aid workers and operations working with the United States.
Turkey, which has close ties to both Russia and the United States, has been instrumental in its NATO allies’ efforts against Russia during the Ukraine conflict. This includes supplying armed drones to Ukraine and helping mediate between Russia and the United States and others.
But Turkey is also trying to exert pressure within the alliance by preventing Finland and Sweden from joining NATO. Turkey is asking Sweden to extradite Kurdish exiles it says are linked to PKK Kurdish insurgents.
Turkey’s state news agency reported that Sweden extradited a PKK member and arrested him upon his arrival in Istanbul on Saturday.
Turkey is one of only two of the 30 NATO members not yet to sign the Nordic countries’ NATO memberships. Hungary is expected to do so.
At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Bucharest, Romania last week, NATO diplomats refrained from confronting Turkey publicly to avoid stirring up offense that would further set back the cause of Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership could.
The Turkish foreign minister made it clear to his European counterparts that Turkey still had to be reassured when it came to Finland or Sweden hosting Kurds in exile there.
“We reminded that in the end it is the Turkish people and the Turkish parliament that need to be convinced,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters on the sidelines.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to speak with the foreign ministers of Finland and Sweden on Thursday about how to deal with Turkey’s objections to its NATO entry.
Experts say the Biden government has plenty of leverage to urge Erdogan to ease the looming escalated attack on Syrian Kurds. These include the sale of US F-16 fighter jets, which Turkey wants but has been opposed by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez and others in Congress.
There is a third major security risk in the US’s handling of Turkey’s invasion threat, along with the potential implications for the Ukraine conflict and efforts to contain Islamic State.
Such is the risk for the Kurds, a stateless people and frequent US ally who have often been abandoned by the US and the West in previous conflicts over the past century.
If the US stands by while Turkey escalates attacks on the Syrian Kurds, who have been instrumental in the suppression of Islamic State, “What message are we sending to the Middle East, particularly Afghanistan?” asked Henri J. Barkey, Expert on Kurds and Turkey at the Council on Foreign Relations and Lehigh University.
“And all allies in general?” Barkey asked.
An ethnic group of millions at the crossroads of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, the Kurds lost a state of their own when the US and other powers carved up what was left of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire after World War I.
Saddam Hussein and other regional leaders have used poison gas, airstrikes and other means of mass murder over the decades to suppress the Kurds. As under US President George HW Bush in 1991 after the Gulf War, the United States at times encouraged popular uprisings but stood by when Kurds died in the resulting massacres.
On November 28, hundreds of Syrian Kurds rallied for the victims of one of Turkey’s airstrikes – five guards were killed while securing al-Hol camp, home to thousands of family members of Islamic State fighters.
Relatives of one of the Kurdish guards, Saifuddin Mohammed, placed his photo on his grave.
“Of course we’re proud,” said his brother Abbas Mohammed. “He defended his country and his honor against the invading Turkish forces.”
—-
Abby Sewell and Bassem Mroue in Beirut, Lorne Cook in Bucharest, Aamer Madhani, Matthew Lee and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, and Hogir al Abdo in Qamishli, Syria contributed to this report.