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Trump Betrays An Ally At The Turkish Border
An American withdrawal from northern Syria will leave Kurds who helped us against the Islamic State to fend for themselves.
The last time I saw my friend Abed, he was in the mood to celebrate. It was about a year ago and the two of us met for dinner in Fatih, a district in Istanbul where many Syrian refugees had settled.
Abed had come from a meeting with the immigration services, and it looked as though his application for Turkish citizenship would soon be approved. His relief was palpable. He ordered us more food than we could possibly finish and spoke with optimism about a business he was starting and the impending birth of his first child.
I eventually asked why he felt so certain about his application. “It’s my last name,” he explained. “The official noted that its origins come from around Aleppo, which, before it was a Syrian city, was an Ottoman one. It turns out I, too, am a Turk.”
Over the past five years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has, through a deft series of political maneuvers, ushered in a vast expansion of Turkish influence across the Middle East, consolidating his power with the establishment of an executive presidency, bolstering his alliance with Russia and compromising the Saudi leadership with leaked surveillance tapes related to the execution of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate.
His latest victory, an assurance by President Trump on Sunday that United States troops will withdraw from a militarized zone along Turkey’s southern border with Syria, could lead to the most significant growth in Turkish territory in 100 years, since the days of the Ottoman sultanate. With an estimated four million Syrian refugees living in Turkey (a number that represents 15 percent of Syria’s prewar population), it isn’t hard to imagine that the Turkish occupation of northern Syria will allow many of those residents to return to the country.
But what will they return as? Syrians? Turks? Or something else?
Turkish identity generally exists as a dehyphenated monolith — aside from the case of the Kurds, who both inside and outside of Turkey have long struggled to express a separate ethnic identity. They’ve also been long and staunch allies of the United States, proving themselves as effective fighters in service of our country’s interests, from the invasion of Iraq to the fight against the Islamic State.
Speaking in defense of his decision to withdrawal American forces and allow a Turkish incursion into territory occupied by the Kurds, Mr. Trump said, “We may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters.”
Yet it’s difficult to see anything but abandonment in the planned withdrawal, leading many of Mr. Trump’s allies to denounce the decision, including his former United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, who tweeted: “We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back. The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake. #TurkeyIsNotOurFriend.”
Unlike our NATO ally Turkey, the Kurds have proven themselves loyal. Loyalty is central to alliances. As it is to friendship.
When I was a Marine, I used to work as a special operator in Afghanistan, fighting alongside a group of Tajik tribesmen who had also proved themselves loyal friends. One of those deployments coincided with a federal government shutdown in Washington, which put limits on the funding of our unit. When I had to explain to my Afghan counterpart that even though he and his men wouldn’t be paid on time, we still needed them to go out on a mission, he asked, “Are you being paid?” When I said yes, he answered, “It doesn’t seem fair that you should be paid on this mission and that we should not.”
Instead of arguing, we delayed the mission. It was a gesture of fairness that was long remembered.
Wars have a long memory. Treating our allies unfairly has never served our interests well over time. Thirty years ago it seemed difficult to imagine a reason for the United States to remain engaged with a Central Asian people with a reputation as fierce fighters who had helped us defeat a common enemy. And so we abandoned the Afghans to their own civil war, creating conditions that led to the rise of the Taliban and the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the short term Mr. Trump might claim that he has disentangled America from yet another foreign intervention. However, the Turks, the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad aren’t playing for the short term.
As Abed and I finished our dinner, the conversation turned to the future. He told me about the office space he was planning to lease in Istanbul and about several common friends of ours who, like him, were turning in their Syrian citizenship to become Turks. With our stomachs full we walked toward the Bosphorus to catch separate trains home.
“Does it seem strange,” I asked, “to think your child will be Turkish?” He laughed, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“Not really,” he said. “Pretty soon none of us will be Turkish. We’ll all be Ottoman.”
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