Would Turkey Risk a Clash with America in Syria?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 December 2018

Tel Abyad, Syria [source]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has threatened a third military operation into Syria, this time in the east. The mobilisation of his proxies and other measures make clear that Erdoğan wants it to be believed he means it. The complication is that the intended target, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are the chosen partners of the United States-led coalition against Islamic State (ISIS), and U.S. soldiers are present in the area.

If we are on the brink of a collision between two NATO powers in Syria, the cause can be traced back to U.S. policy decisions. Having decreed in 2011 that Syrian President Bashar Assad must go, President Barack Obama was, first, paralysed by the spectre of Iraq from doing anything to implement this policy, and subsequently reversed course entirely as part of his diplomacy with Iran. This left Turkey, which had acted on Obama’s words and provided support to the anti-Assad rebellion, facing the crisis alone.

Obama was forced to intervene against ISIS in August 2014 after it began marching toward Iraqi Kurdistan, a zone regarded, by consensus in the United States, as one of the few successes of the Iraq war. The genocide against the Yazidis and the murder of Western captives intensified the political pressure to combat ISIS. The next month the intervention was, logically, extended to Syria, since ISIS held territory on both sides of a border.

Read the rest at Ahval

1 thought on “Would Turkey Risk a Clash with America in Syria?”

  1. pre-Boomer Marine brat

    As things stand at noon on Dec. 19th, I believe Recep Erdogan and Hulusi Akar would, AND WILL.

    For whatever reason, Trump is obviously taking Erdogan at face value, as Chamberlain did Hitler. What’s ironic is that college student Erdogan proudly carried a copy of Mein Kampf among his schoolbooks.

    I cannot imagine Trump as even a covert supporter of a fascist dictatorship (such as Erdogan has created.) I am therefore led to believe that Trump has little if any grasp of international … “whatever.”

    Obama’s 2011 bug-out from Iraq was very deliberate. He declared the war “won” and did what he’d wanted to do as US Senator. Prior to his announcement for the Presidency, he’d been ranked as the furthest-Left and the most-anti-Iraq War in the Senate.

    Trump seems “merely” ignorant.

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