Removing troops puts Kurds at risk

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Removing troops puts Kurds at risk
Kurdish YPG fighters sit together. | Flickr

When President Donald Trump announced that he would be pulling American troops out of Syria, he was immediately met with bipartisan opposition. And on Oct. 29, the House of Representatives passed a bill 403-16 in favor of imposing sanctions on Turkey for its military actions in northern Syria.

After eight years of civil war in Syria and fighting against the Islamic state, American forces and the Kurdish fighters, that the United States has supported, have accomplished wiping out most of the strongholds of the Islamic state. Trump, in extreme naivete, thinks this means that it’s time to pull out and leave the Kurds prey to an even more powerful enemy than the Islamic state: Turkey.

Pulling American troops out of Syria would lead to multiple problems. If the Kurds are left alone, they may fall prey to Turkish aggression, northern Syria would be weakened, and the Islamic state might be tempted to resurrect itself, thus rewinding the clock of the past decade and relaunching the long crisis that the Middle East and Europe is still trying to emerge from.

Trump tweeted last week, “We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives.” This may be true, but yanking support and protection away from them when Turkey is waiting to pounce, is an awful mistake that could result in some very serious political and humanitarian problems.

Fortunately, there was strong bipartisan resistance to Trump’s sudden announcement to move troops out of Syria. There will be a reduced U.S. force remaining in Syria to guard the Syrian oil fields so that any remaining pockets of the Islamic state cannot gain access to oil revenue.

And then there was Trump’s oh-so-reassuring Tweet, in which he said, “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)”

But the Kurds are still calling this decision abandonment and saying Trump has stabbed them in the back, as they have fought the Islamic state partially on the U.S.’s behalf since 2014.

The Kurds are justifiably afraid to be left alone on the Syrian-Turkish border within Erdogan’s reach. And though Ankara and Moscow agreed on a ceasefire to allow Kurds to evacuate the area near the Syria-Turkey border, Kurdish fears were proved last week on Oct. 24, when Turkey and its local allies began directing ground assault and artillery shelling on several border towns which caused thousands of Kurdish civilians to flee.

Turkish history alone is enough to justify serious concern about leaving the Kurds alone. Trump should take a look at history — and particularly Turkey’s long-held hatred for the Kurdish people — and its bad habit of genocide and holding to an ideology of ethnic purity.

There are roughly 35 million Kurds scattered throughout the Middle East, making them one of the largest ethnic groups in the region. Unlike other large ethnic groups, like the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians, the Kurds have no state of their own and are instead scattered throughout Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. But it is in and around Turkey that Kurds have been in the most danger and this has been a persistent problem since the end of World War I.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a growing mindset among Turks to create an indivisible nation by removing any non-Turkish elements of society. This led to the Armenian Genocide, from 1915 to 1923, when the Ottoman government systematically wiped out 1.5 million Armenians, most of whom were Ottoman citizens. And though the Turkish government still denies the Armenian genocide, on Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted 405-11 in favor of recognizing and commemorating the Armenian genocide.

The Kurds were another significant non-Turkish population in Turkey. After Turkey gained its independence in 1923, its drive to create a purified Turkish state grew stronger.

In 1930, the Turksh minister of justice said, “The Turk is the only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish origin will have only one right in Turkey: the right to be servants and slaves.” The Kurds were consistently persecuted throughout the 20th century.

In the 1970s the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) rose up inside Turkey to fight for an independent Kurdish state. There has been continual violence and tension between the PKK, and Erdogan and the rest of the Turkish government considers the PKK a dangerous terrorist threat.

Trump, supporting his sudden turn against the Kurds, said that the PKK is “worse at terror and more of a terrorist threat, in many ways” than the Islamic state.

Now, with Trump’s rash announcement to pull troops out from Syria, the Kurds in Syria near the Turkish border — particularly those of the YPG who have been fighting ISIS — are vulnerable.

Erdogan will do just about anything to keep the Kurds weak so that they can never threaten him with the formation of a Kurdish state on his border. And Trump is trying to hand him the opportunity to do so and fuel Turkish hostilities against the Kurds.

If Erdogan is not trying to eradicate the Kurds on his border, he is at least trying to forcibly get them farther away from the border so that he can have a 300-mile buffer zone. Trump trying to pull out U.S. troops would achieve Erdogan’s goal for him and would weaken the Kurds making them ripe for Turkish aggression and also giving ISIS the distinct possibility of a come back.

The decision to leave some troops to guard the Syrian oil fields is the very bare minimum that the U.S. should do to curb Turkey, keep the Kurds safe and stable, and deter the Islamic state from resurrection.

Many, including Trump, argue that the U.S. needs to stop being the world police, and this is a good opportunity to stop. But we are already waist deep in the Middle East, especially in Syria. The U.S. has been supporting and fighting alongside the Kurds for nearly half a decade, and with Turkey on the prowl and plenty of instability rampant in the region (i.e. ISIS coming back), this is not the time to leave the Kurds hanging out to dry.