THE MIDDLE EAST

thelivyjr
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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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MARKETWATCH

"Syrian troops move north, setting up potential clash with Turkish forces"


By Associated Press

Published: Oct 14, 2019 4:49 p.m. ET

AKCAKALE, Turkey — Syrian government troops moved into towns and villages in northeastern Syria on Monday, including the flashpoint region of Manbij, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces advancing in the area as long-standing alliances in the region began to shift or crumble following the pullback of U.S. forces.

The Syrian military’s deployment near the Turkish border came after Syrian Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, now in its sixth day.

Assad’s return to the region his troops abandoned in 2012 at the height of the Syrian civil war is a turning point in Syria’s eight-year civil war, giving yet another major boost to his government and its Russian backers and is like to endanger, if not altogether crush, the brief experiment in self-rule set up by Syria’s Kurds since the conflict began.

The rapidly changing situation was set in motion last week, when President Donald Trump ordered American troops in northern Syria to step aside, clearing the way for an attack by Turkey, which regards the Kurdish fighters as terrorists.

Since 2014, the Kurds have fought alongside the U.S. in defeating the Islamic State in Syria, and Trump’s move was decried at home and abroad as a betrayal of an ally.

Faced with unrelenting criticism, Trump said Monday he was putting new sanctions on Turkey, halting trade negotiations and raising steel tariffs in an effort to pressure Ankara to stop its offensive.

In the past five days, Turkish troops and their allies have pushed into northern towns and villages, clashing with the Kurdish fighters over a stretch of 125 miles.

The offensive has displaced at least 130,000 people.

“Where is the United Nations?"

"Let them come see the blood of our children on the floor!"

"Why don’t they show up?” cried a medic at the Tal Tamr hospital, which received dozens of injured people from nearby Turkish shelling in recent days.

Abandoned in the middle of the battlefield, the Kurds turned to Assad and Russia for protection and announced Sunday night that Syrian government troops would be deployed in Kurdish-controlled towns and villages along the border to help repel the Turkish advance.

Kurdish official Aldar Khalil said in a statement that the aim of the agreement is for Syrian troops to be deployed along the border, except for the area between the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad, where Turkish troops are advancing.

He added that the autonomous authority will continue to run daily affairs in northeast Syria.

“There is an understanding between SDF and Damascus — a military agreement only,” said Badran Ciya Kurd, a senior Kurdish official, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

He has been in talks with Russians since the start, and he made his comments in an interview with The Associated Press.

Syrian state media broadcast repeated footage of government forces entering northern towns and villages with residents chanting slogans in support of Assad, while others rushed to hug the soldiers.

In a northern village, residents welcomed the troops by showering them with rice, an Arab gesture of welcome.

In another village, dozens of young men rode motorcycles as some waved posters of Assad.

“We are going back to our normal positions that are at the border,” said a Syrian officer, as embattled Kurdish authorities invited the government to retake towns and villages in the north.

“May God protect the army!” residents responded.

The dramatic events are a crushing blow to the dreams of Syria’s Kurds who had built up a degree of autonomy that was unthinkable before the war, when they were an oppressed minority by the Assad family rule.

The ethnic group grew from an underdog in Syria to a prestigious group that controls about 30% of Syrian territory, working hand in hand with the Americans to defeat the Islamic State group.

A return by Assad’s forces to their region is a major shift in Syria’s long-running civil war, further cementing Assad’s hold over the ravaged country.

The Syrian troops arrived in the northern province of Raqqa aboard buses and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.

Troops moved into the towns of Tal Tamr, about 12 miles from the Turkish border, Ein Issa and Tabqa, known for its dam on the Euphrates River and a nearby air base of the same name.

They later entered the Kurdish-held town of Manbij, in a race with Turkey-backed opposition fighters advancing in the same direction.

The Manbij region is home to U.S. outposts that were set up in 2017 to patrol the tense frontiers between Turkish-controlled areas and the Kurdish-held side of northern Syria.

A U.S. official said troops are still in the town, preparing to leave.

Earlier, Syrian fighters backed by Turkey said they began an offensive alongside Turkish troops to capture Manbij, which is on the western flank of the Euphrates River, broadening their campaign east of the river.

Mustafa Sejari, an official with the Turkey-backed fighters, tweeted: “The battle of Manbij has begun.”

Turkey’s private NTV television reported that Turkish special forces and commandos began advancing toward Manbij in the afternoon.

CNN-Turk also mentioned the attack, reporting that the sound of clashes could be heard.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled earlier in the day his military was ready to begin the assault Manbij, with a goal of returning the city to Arab populations that he said were its rightful owners.

Speaking later in Baku, Azerbaijan, Erdogan said Turkey’s military offensive into northeast Syria is as “vital” to Turkey as its 1974 military intervention in Cyprus, which split the island.

Erdogan also made clear Turkey would not halt its offensive despite the widespread condemnation.

The military action by Ankara sets up a potential clash between Turkey and Syria and raises the specter of a resurgent Islamic State group as the U.S. relinquishes any remaining influence in northern Syria to Assad and his chief backer, Russia.

Turkey warned its NATO allies in Europe and the United States not to stand in its way.

Trump said the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops he ordered out of Syria would remain in the Middle East to prevent a resurgence of the IS threat.

The European Union unanimously condemned Turkey’s military move and asked all 28 of its member states to stop selling arms to Ankara, Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell told the AP.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russian and Turkish officials have remained in close contact.

Russia appeared to be working on de-confliction between Turkish and Syrian troops.

Erdogan has already said Turkey will not negotiate with the Syrian Kurdish fighters, saying they have links to a long-running Kurdish insurgency within its own borders.

Syria’s state-run news agency SANA said government forces planned to “confront the Turkish aggression,” without giving further details.

Photos posted by SANA showed several vehicles and a small number of troops in Tal Tamr, a predominantly Assyrian Christian town that was once held by IS before it was retaken by Kurdish-led forces.

Many Syrian Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million, left for Europe in the past 20 years, with the flight gathering speed since the conflict began in March 2011.

Heavy fighting on Sunday reached a Kurdish-run camp for displaced persons in Ein Issa.

The camp is home to about 12,000 people, including around 950 wives and children of IS fighters, and hundreds are believed to have escaped amid the chaos.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/syria ... latestnews
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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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MARKETWATCH

"Top Democrats walk out of White House meeting on Syria following ‘meltdown’ by Trump"


By Associated Press

Published: Oct 16, 2019 6:11 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Washing his hands of Syria, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday the U.S. has no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners against IS extremists.

Hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats walked out of a meeting at the White House, accusing him of having a “meltdown,” calling her a “third-rate politician” and having no plan to deal with a potentially revived Islamic State group.


Condemnation of Trump’s stance on Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was quick and severe during the day, not only from Democrats but from Republicans who have been staunch supporters on virtually all issues.

The House, bitterly divided over the Trump impeachment inquiry, banded together for an overwhelming 354-60 denunciation of the U.S. troop withdrawal.

Many lawmakers expressed worry that it may lead to revival of IS as well as Russian presence and influence in the area — in addition to the slaughter of many Kurds.

At the White House, Trump said the U.S. has no business in the region — and not to worry about the Kurdish fighters.

“They know how to fight,” he said.

“And by the way, they’re no angels.”

After the House condemnation vote, the congressional leaders of both parties went to the White house for a briefing, which grew contentious, with Trump and Pelosi trading jabs.

The Democrats said they walked out when the meeting devolved into an insult-fest.

“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown,” Pelosi told reporters, saying Trump appeared visibly “shaken up” over the House vote.

“We couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it,” she said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump for not having an adequate plan to deal with IS fighters who have been held by the Kurds.

He said the meeting “was not a dialogue, this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts.”

Republicans pushed back, saying it was Pelosi who’d been the problem.

“She storms out of another meeting, trying to make it unproductive,” said House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called Pelosi’s action “baffling but not surprising.”

She said the speaker “had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues.”


Trump himself has stalked out of his White House meetings with congressional leaders — in May, saying he would no longer work with Democrats unless they dropped all Russia investigations, and last January during the partial government shutdown.

Separately on Wednesday, a letter was disclosed in which he both cajoled and threatened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, urging him to act only in “the right and humane way” in Syria.

He started on a positive note, suggesting they “work out a good deal,” but then talked about crippling economic sanctions and concluded that the world “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen."

"Don’t be a tough guy."

"Don’t be a fool!”

In public appearances Wednesday, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East -- casting aside criticism that a sudden U.S. withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains U.S. credibility around the world and opens an important region to Russia, which is moving in.

“We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria."

"Syria’s not happy about it."

"Let them work it out,” Trump said.

“They have a problem at a border."

"It’s not our border."

"We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

Trump said he was sending Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to urge the Turks to halt their weeklong offensive into northeastern Syria.

But his remarks, first to reporters in the Oval Office and later at a news conference with his Italian counterpart, suggested he sees little at stake for America.

“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” he said.

“They’ve got a lot of sand over there."

"So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”

“Let them fight their own wars.”

More than once, Trump suggested the United States has little concern in the Middle East because it is geographically distant -- a notion shared by some prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida militants used Afghanistan as a base from which to attack the U.S.

That attack set off a series of armed conflicts, including in Iraq, that Trump considers a waste of American lives and treasure.

The current withdrawal is the worst decision of Trump’s presidency, said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who meets often with the president and is one of his strongest and most important supporters in Congress.

“To those who think the Mideast doesn’t matter to America, remember 9/11 -- we had that same attitude on 9/10 2001.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he strongly disagreed with Trump and had told the president so.

But he asked, “What tools do we have” to back up that disagreement?

Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area.

Turkey’s Erdogan has said he wants to create a 30-kilometer (20-mile) -deep “safe zone” in Syria.

Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.

Trump mischaracterized the progress made thus far by the U.S. military in carrying out his instructions to withdraw all 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria.

He referred to the approximately two dozen soldiers who evacuated from Turkey’s initial attack zone last week, but cast that as meaning the U.S. has “largely” completed its pullout.

A U.S. official familiar with planning for the withdrawal of the 1,000 said that they are consolidating onto two main bases but have not yet begun flying out of Syria in significant numbers.

Military equipment is being gathered and flown out, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the withdrawal, which poses big security risks.

Trump downplayed the crisis that followed his decision to pull out of Syria, which critics say amounted to giving Turkey a green light to invade against the Kurdish fighters.

“It’s not between Turkey and the United States, like a lot of stupid people would like you to believe,” Trump said.

“Our soldiers are not in harm’s way, as they shouldn’t be.”

Trump did impose new sanctions on Turkey this week in an attempt to force Erdogan to end his assault.

But he said Wednesday, “It’s time for us to come home.”

Even as Trump defended his removal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, he praised his decision to send more troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom defend against Iran.

Trump said the U.S. is sending missiles and “great power” to the Saudis, and “they’re paying for that.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-d ... latestnews
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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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WE LIVE IN A TIME OF INSANE NATIONAL LEADERS …

ERDOGAN HAS A WORM TWISTING IN HIS BRAIN FROM THE SOUND OF THINGS HERE ...

FOX News

"Erdogan vows to 'crush the heads' of Kurds if they don't withdraw; both sides trade blame for violating cease-fire"


Melissa Leon

19 OCTOBER 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday promised to "crush the heads" of the Kurds in Syria if they don't fall back from the border's safe zone, according to reports.

The threat comes as both Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claim the other is violating terms of a 120-hour cease-fire brokered by Turkey and the U.S. on Thursday.

Violence continued in northeast Syria despite the five-day peace agreement, a source told Fox News.

Dave Eubank with Free Burma Rangers, a private military company that provides emergency medical assistance, was on the ground near the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn trying to help trapped and wounded Kurds.

Eubank told Fox News the fighting hasn't stopped and movement in the area is severely limited, despite the cease-fire's intention to "pause" fighting to allow Syrian Kurds time and space to retreat from the area.

Thousands of Kurdish civilians live in the so-called buffer zone, a senior military source had told Fox News.

The Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) was "still shooting all through the night," Eubank said.

"So far since [the] cease-fire, no airstrikes here, but artillery and ground attacks."

Erdogan threatened the Kurds on Saturday during a televised speech, saying they will be slaughtered if they don't pull back from the 20-mile-wide safe zone along the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday night.

"We will start where we left off and continue to crush the terrorists' heads," Erdogan said.

Turkey claims it is living up to the terms of the cease-fire agreement and accused the Kurds of violating it.

The Turkish Defense Ministry said Kurdish forces carried out 14 "provocative" attacks in Ras al-Ayn in 36 hours, according to the BBC.

In a statement, the SDF said there has been "no tangible progress" in solving the issues at the northeast border.

As of Friday, 86 civilians had been killed since Turkey launched its military offensive into Syria on Oct. 9, according to a war monitor, the BBC reported.

Erdogan claimed the move was to "neutralize terror threats" and establish a "safe zone."

After carrying out airstrikes, Turkish ground troops later invaded northeastern Syria.

Nearly all U.S. troops there have been removed and will be redeployed in the region in the coming weeks.

The U.S. had teamed up with the Kurds to fight ISIS in the region.

Some analysts and politicians criticized President Trump for removing America forces, saying it was a "green light" for Ankara to invade Syria and fight the Kurds.

Trump said the Turks have been "warring for many years," and that the U.S. does not need to protect war-torn Syria because it's "7,000 miles away."

The president on Friday claimed "thousands and thousands" of lives were being saved in Syria and Turkey due to the cease-fire.

Fox News' Griff Jenkins and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/erd ... P17#page=2
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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Trump Said to Favor Leaving a Few Hundred Troops in Eastern Syria"


Eric Schmitt and Maggie Haberman

21 OCTOBER 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump is leaning in favor of a new Pentagon plan to keep a small contingent of American troops in eastern Syria, perhaps numbering about 200, to combat the Islamic State and block the advance of Syrian government and Russian forces into the region’s coveted oil fields, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

If Mr. Trump approves the proposal to leave a couple of hundred Special Operations forces in eastern Syria, it would mark the second time in 10 months that he has reversed his order to pull out nearly all American troops from the country.

Last December, Mr. Trump directed 2,000 American troops to leave Syria immediately, only to relent later and approve a more gradual withdrawal.

The decision would also be the potential second major political reversal in a matter of days under pressure from his own party, after he rescinded on Saturday a decision to host next year’s Group of 7 summit at his own resort.

Mr. Trump has come under withering criticism from former military commanders, Democrats and even some of his staunchest Republican allies for pulling back United States troops from Syria’s border with Turkey, clearing the way for a Turkish offensive that in nearly two weeks has killed scores of Syrian Kurdish fighters and civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents.

A senior administration official said on Sunday that Mr. Trump has since last week been considering a plan to leave a couple of hundred troops in northeast Syria, near the border with Iraq, for counterterrorism efforts.

The official said it is a concept Mr. Trump favors.

Three other administration and Defense Department officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential military planning, confirmed over the weekend that the option was being discussed among top American policymakers and commanders.

The senior administration official said it was highly likely that troops would be kept along the Iraqi border area — away from the cease-fire zone that Vice President Mike Pence negotiated with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey last week.

The main goal would be to prevent the Islamic State from re-establishing all or parts of its religious state, or caliphate, in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

A side benefit would be helping the Kurds keep control of oil fields in the east, the official said.

Mr. Trump seemed to hint at this outcome in a message on Twitter on Sunday, saying, “We have secured the Oil.”

The senior administration official suggested that the president was balancing competing impulses: achieving the ultimate goal of bringing United State forces home from Syria — part of a signature campaign promise to pull American troops from “endless wars” — and ensuring that efforts to contain and diminish ISIS continue.

The order also could be heard as at least a partial answer to those who have criticized the president’s policy.

The officials indicated that Mr. Trump could describe the continued deployment of the small contingent of troops as a thoughtful, reasonable way to help safeguard regional and American security without violating his campaign pledge.

The senior official insisted the president’s approach to the incursion ordered by Mr. Erdogan had been mischaracterized, and pushed back against a widely held public narrative that Mr. Trump “greenlighted” the attack.

Critics of Mr. Trump’s Syria policy have said the president, by telling Mr. Erdogan that he would order American troops to pull back from positions along the border where they had fought alongside Syrian Kurds, essentially acquiesced to the Turkish offensive.

Mr. Erdogan called Mr. Trump on Oct. 6 for the express purpose of informing him that Turkish forces planned to cross the border, the official said, and Mr. Trump made it clear to him that it was not a good idea — and did not endorse the attack.

Mr. Trump followed up on Oct. 9 with a now-infamous letter to Mr. Erdogan.

The senior administration official said that the American troops were withdrawn from the border area because Turkish forces were coming across into Syria, and that they were sitting in harm’s way, a rationale that Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also have expressed in recent days.

Spokeswomen for Mr. Esper and General Milley declined on Sunday to comment on any options under discussion.

White House officials argue that leaving a small contingent of troops in eastern Syria is not a policy reversal because the goal of the original withdrawal was to protect lives.

Unlike Mr. Trump’s withdrawal order in December, administration officials say, this time was never about bringing troops home because they were always going to remain elsewhere in the region, in particular in Iraq.

But the White House has struggled to articulate a clear position on what the administration is trying to accomplish as Mr. Erdogan has clearly been undeterred and Mr. Trump, who hates appearing weak, has shrugged off the fighting on his Twitter feed and in a campaign rally.

“It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home."

"WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN."

"Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Oct. 7.

“After defeating 100% of the ISIS Caliphate, I largely moved our troops out of Syria."

"Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land."

"I said to my Generals, why should we be fighting for Syria and Assad to protect the land of our enemy?” Mr. Trump said in another Twitter message on Oct. 14.

The discussion over leaving a residual counterterrorism force in eastern Syria was unfolding as the bulk of the nearly 1,000 American forces now in Syria continued to withdraw on Sunday.

Mr. Esper told reporters traveling with him to Afghanistan on Saturday that the troops would go to bases in western Iraq.

From there, Mr. Esper said, American troops would “help defend Iraq” and “perform a counter-ISIS mission” — presumably carrying out periodic cross-border Special Operations raids and conducting armed drone strikes against Islamic State cells.

ISIS has already sought to exploit the chaos in northern Syria to break out insurgents from Kurdish-run jails, to attack Kurdish fighters and to regain momentum overall.

“They will rally."

"These are resilient adversaries,” Gen. Tony Thomas, who retired after serving as head of the military’s Special Operations Command, said of the Islamic State on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“We’ve done nothing to knock down the ideology, and I think they’ll see this as certainly a respite, if not an opportunity to have a resurgence.”

The proposal to keep a counterterrorism force in eastern Syria resulted from the Defense Department directing the military’s Central Command in recent days to provide options for continuing the fight against Islamic State in Syria.

One of those options, which is said to be Mr. Trump’s choice, would keep a contingent of about 200 Special Operations forces at a few bases in eastern Syria, some near the Iraqi border, where they have been working alongside Syrian Kurdish partners.

Military officials also are expected to brief Mr. Trump this week on that plan and of the other counterterrorism options — including keeping some troops in Syria and using other commandos based in Iraq.

Mr. Trump would need to approve any plan to leave forces in any part of Syria in addition to the about 150 in Al-Tanf, a small garrison in south-central Syria.

The commander of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, Mazlum Kobani, whose fighters switched sides to join Syrian government forces after Mr. Trump announced the American withdrawal, said on Saturday that despite the Turkish offensive, his troops had resumed counterterrorism operations near Deir al-Zour.

American officials widely interpreted the comments as a signal to Washington that the Syrian Kurds were still willing to fight in partnership with the United States against the Islamic State in eastern Syria, despite their abandonment in other parts of the country.

Some lawmakers suggested that it may be too late to contain the damage done to the counterterrorism mission and, more broadly, American credibility overseas.

Representative Will Hurd, a Texas Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, described the cease-fire agreement announced on Thursday as “terms of surrender” to Turkey.

Also appearing on “Face the Nation,” Mr. Hurd, a former C.I.A. officer, referred to Turkey, a NATO ally, as part of a group of American “enemies” and “adversaries” who will benefit from the cease-fire agreement.

“Our enemies and our adversaries like Iran, Russia, Turkey, they’re playing chess,” he said.

“Unfortunately, this administration is playing checkers.”

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Trump Calls for Control, Use of Syrian Oil Fields"


Michael R. Gordon, Timothy Puko

22 OCTOBER 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump said that he is planning to keep a small number of troops in northeast Syria to protect the oil fields there and suggested that an American company might help the Syrian Kurds develop the oil for export.

“I always said if you’re going in, keep the oil,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting Monday.


“We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow."

"Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”

Former administration officials said Mr. Trump’s plan raises a host of legal, technical and diplomatic issues.

And industry analysts say it is unlikely to draw any interest from the oil companies it would need to succeed.

Rex Tillerson, a onetime Exxon Co. CEO, had considered the idea when he was secretary of state only to conclude there were formidable legal barriers, said Brett McGurk, who served as the administration’s special envoy to the coalition fighting Islamic State until he resigned in December.

“Oil, like it or not, is owned by the Syrian state,” Mr. McGurk said Monday in an appearance at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

“Maybe there are new lawyers, but it was just illegal for an American company to go and seize and exploit these assets."

Mr. McGurk said that the only way to export the oil legally, the State Department concluded at the time, was to have an arrangement in which the money was put in escrow for use by the Syrians after the civil war was over, an arrangement that would have involved Russia and the Assad government.

Mr. Tillerson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Fuad Hussein, Iraq’s finance minister, said that his government hadn’t yet been approached about Mr. Trump’s plan, which U.S. officials said would involve exporting Syrian oil, possibly produced with the help of an American company, through Iraq.

“This is new."

"It must be discussed in Baghdad, in Erbil,” Mr. Hussein said in an interview, referring to the capital of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq.

“This needs a lot of discussion.”

The White House hasn’t provided details of Mr. Trump’s troop plan, which has supplanted his original order to remove all of the 1,000 troops from the northeast part of the country.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said earlier Monday that a small U.S. force, which military officials said could number up to 300, would remain in northeastern Syria after other U.S. troops are withdrawn under Mr. Trump’s orders.

Proponents say safeguarding the oil provides a way to maintain the U.S. relationship with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, keep up the fight against Islamic State and provide the Kurds with an alternative to selling oil to middlemen who transfer it to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Kurds and Mr. Trump’s critics have charged the U.S. withdrawal represents the abandonment of a longtime ally.

Mr. Trump long has advocated the control and sale of foreign resources, saying it could help American deployments pay for themselves.

Mr. Trump’s White House staff researched the possibilities in several conflict zones, doing the deepest such assessment of Afghanistan.

Potentially large mineral reserves there have gone untapped because of conflict, poor infrastructure and ineffective governance.

Those problems would limit opportunities for the U.S. to benefit from increased mining and drilling by discouraging U.S. firms from working there, the assessment concluded, echoing others.

Any U.S. government attempt to benefit from resources in previously examined areas likely would be hamstrung, because Washington doesn’t operate a state-owned energy or mining company, said a person familiar with these assessments.

The government would have to rely on enticing a private U.S. business to enter a conflict zone, a task even more challenging when global oil prices are relatively low and security in the region is in doubt.

Mr. Trump previously has complained that the U.S. didn’t take oil from Iraq following the 2003 American-led invasion.

Syria’s oil and gas fields in Kurdish-held areas have long figured in U.S. strategic plans to influence developments in the region.

American officials have hoped that they and the Kurds could maintain control of that oil-rich territory, building leverage that could be used if political discussions about the future of Syria eventually are held.

At a minimum, the U.S. has wanted to keep the oil fields out of the hands of Islamic State militants and the Russians.

But Mr. Trump’s talk about bringing in an American company to develop the oil fields represents a new concept, which follows conversations with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

Syria’s crude production had once been as high as 600,000 barrels a day, but fell to about 400,000 barrels around the outbreak of the war, according to data from an arm of the U.S. Energy Department.

It quickly dropped again, by more than half, and Syria produced only about 40,000 barrels a day during the three years Islamic State controlled the region, from 2014 to 2017, according to those figures.

Following the U.S-led campaign against the militant group, production fell by half again, before rebounding to about 30,000 barrels a day last year.

The only pipelines from the region go west, into territory controlled by Mr. Assad.

And exporting the oil through Turkey would be a political nonstarter, given the Kurds’ tensions with Ankara, which considers its military forces to be terrorists.

U.S. officials said the oil could be exported through Iraq.

Some of Syria’s lower-quality heavy oil, they say, might be blended with higher-quality Iraqi crude before being sold on the international market.

Oil analysts dispute this as unlikely or unprofitable.

A key question is whether a U.S. company would be prepared to invest and develop the Kurdish-held fields given the legal, diplomatic and security complications, along with Mr. Trump’s wavering commitment to keep troops in Syria.

“The biggest fields are in the worst shape,” said Matthew Reed, an analyst at Washington-based consulting firm Foreign Reports.

“We’re probably talking multibillion-dollar investments that won’t pay off for years, assuming ISIS doesn’t return or Assad doesn’t capture them.”

Trump administration officials assert that the several hundred members of the U.S. special operations forces the Pentagon is planning to send to northeast Syria would be sufficient to secure the oil-rich region if the Americans were working with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and were protected by American air power.

But the security plan, like the rest of Mr. Trump’s plan, remains in progress and faces unanswered questions.

“We have already given up almost the entire perimeter of northeast Syria,” Mr. McGurk said, referring to the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. troops that is now under way.

“And we are now going to hole up in a Fort Apache with a couple of hundred Americans?"

"Let’s not exaggerate that that gives us any influence over the course of events in Syria."

"That influence has evaporated.”


Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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ERDOGAN IS A SACK OF WIND PUFFING OUT COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF SMOKE ...

CBS NEWS

"Turkey's Erdogan threatens to "crush" former U.S. allies in Syria"


CBSNews

22 OCTOBER 2019

Sanliurfa, Turkey — Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to "crush the heads" of America's former allies, the Kurdish-led forces in Syria, if they don't fully withdraw from the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday evening.

The five-day ceasefire that the Trump administration got Erdogan to agree to expires at 7 p.m. local time, or noon Eastern.

Erdogan has said if the Kurds aren't completely out of what he's dubbed a "safe zone," stretching across most of Syria's northern border and about 20 miles south into Syrian territory, his offensive against them will resume.

Already it is said to have claimed dozens of civilian lives and has driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.

So as CBS News Holly Williams reports, the stakes were high on Tuesday as Erdogan met President Vladimir Putin in Russia.

The future of Syria could be decided at their meeting; Russia is poised to step into the power vacuum the U.S. left behind when President Trump ordered American troops to leave northeast Syria earlier this month, effectively opening the door to a deadly Turkish offensive.

Those U.S. forces only numbered around 1,000, but with their Kurdish partners they were able to beat back ISIS and bring relative stability to a large swathe of Syria after six years of war.

Thousands of the Kurdish-led fighters died battling ISIS, and now say they've been betrayed by America.

About 200,000 civilians have fled the clashes with Turkey, and a Kurdish lawmaker called on President Trump Monday to stop what she called "ethnic cleansing" of the Kurds in northern Syria.

Turkey, however, insists its offensive has not targeted civilians.

Erdogan's government views the Kurdish-led forces as terrorists linked to a separatist movement based in southern Turkey.

Syria's Russian-backed President Bashar Assad has lambasted Turkey for its offensive on his soil, and chided the Syrian Kurds for seeking help from the U.S.

On Tuesday the Syrian dictator paid a visit to his troops on the front lines of Idlib province, in territory recently reclaimed from Turkish-backed militias.

It was his first visit to the province in seven years.

Arriving in the southern countryside of Idlib, Assad strongly denounced Erdogan for the incursion into northern Syria, calling him "a thief."

"He has robbed the factories, wheat and oil, and today he is robbing the land," Assad asserted.

Since the U.S. began moving its forces out of the region, the long-time U.S. allies of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who for years helped the U.S. battle ISIS while also fending off attacks from Assad's forces, have formed limited partnerships with the Syrian leader's Russian-backed regime.

President Trump has warned Erdogan to restrain his forces and threatened to destroy Turkey's economy if the offensive goes too far.

But on Monday, Mr. Trump also said the U.S. had "never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives."

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"U.S. Weighs Leaving More Troops, Sending Battle Tanks to Syria"


Gordon Lubold, Nancy A. Youssef

25 OCTOBER 2019

WASHINGTON—The White House is considering options for leaving about 500 U.S. troops in northeast Syria and for sending dozens of battle tanks and other equipment, officials said Thursday, the latest in an array of scenarios following President Trump’s decision this month to remove all troops there.

The options, presented by military officials, would represent a reversal from the American withdrawal Mr. Trump wanted.

It also would modify U.S. objectives — from countering Islamic State extremists to also safeguarding oil fields in eastern Syria with additional troops and new military capability.

Washington sees the fields as potential leverage in future negotiations over Syria.


“We will NEVER let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields!” Mr. Trump said Thursday in a Twitter message, referring to Islamic State.

The options for tanks and troops, which hasn’t been decided, were being discussed in Washington as Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in Brussels, urged U.S. allies at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting to respond to Turkey’s incursion into Syria earlier this month.

Mr. Esper’s request came amid fissures in the security bloc’s approach to the crisis and over the Trump administration’s policy shifts.

Mr. Trump earlier this month ordered all U.S. troops out of northern Syria, a move that was criticized by Kurdish fighters allied with the U.S. as an abandonment.

Critics say Turkey launched the mission because it believed Mr. Trump greenlighted the move during an Oct. 6 call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Trump said he didn’t give a go-ahead for the assault.

The U.S. leader then imposed sanctions on Turkey and threatened to destroy the NATO ally’s economy before lifting the sanctions when Turkey announced a cease-fire.

Mr. Esper said he supported a proposal this week by German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to create an international security zone in northern Syria with Russia and Turkey, which have already made their own deal to secure the region.

Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer outlined her proposal at the NATO meeting, noting that the Russia-Turkey deal was insufficient to bring long-term peace.

“There are different views,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Thursday evening.

“This was an open and frank discussion among friends and allies."

"There is strong support for a political solution.”

Mr. Trump, after ordering all U.S. forces out of northeastern Syria in early October, said later that he would agree to leave about 200 troops in northeast Syria to safeguard oil fields.

The move came after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) outlined the potential importance of the oil.

Mr. Graham suggested in remarks to reporters at the Capitol on Thursday that American troops would end up securing the oil fields.

He was among eight to 10 senators briefed by the White House on Thursday.

“There are some plans coming together from the Joint Chiefs that I think may work, that may give us what we need to prevent ISIS from coming back, Iran taking the oil, ISIS from taking the oil,” he said.

“I am somewhat encouraged that a plan is coming about that will meet our core objectives in Syria.”

The top U.S. envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, said in testimony Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the U.S. also may hang onto a Syrian airfield.

“We do contemplate, I believe, maintaining one of our two airfields that are there,” Mr. Jeffrey said.

The option of sending tanks was earlier reported by Newsweek.

While the Trump administration’s plans for U.S. troops in Syria shifts, so do the plans for what to do with the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops, most of them special operations forces, following Mr. Trump’s order to withdraw.

Mr. Esper said over the weekend that most of the troops would go to neighboring Iraq, triggering a pointed reaction from Baghdad, where officials said those troops would only be able to remain for a period of four weeks.


Meeting at NATO headquarters, Mr. Esper criticized Ankara for its assault.

“Turkey’s unwarranted incursion into northern Syria jeopardizes the gains made there in recent years,” Mr. Esper said.

“Turkey put us all in a terrible situation,” he added later.

For NATO, disagreement over how to address Turkey’s actions strikes another blow to the unity of an alliance already rocked by Mr. Trump’s frequent broadsides over what he says is insufficient military spending by allies.

French President Emmanuel Macron — whose country has special forces in northern Syria — has responded with anger over the abrupt U.S. move to withdraw troops from Syria, which he said he learned about on Twitter.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has further exasperated NATO allies by deepening his relationship with President Vladimir Putin, including through the purchase of an air-defense system from Russia.

“The direction of Turkey with regard to the alliance is heading in the wrong direction,” Mr. Esper said.

Write to Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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AFP

"15 dead in Syria clashes between pro-Turkish forces, Kurds: monitor"


afp.com

27 OCTOBER 2019

Clashes in northeast Syria between pro-Ankara fighters backed by the Turkish air force and a Damascus-backed force led by Syrian Kurds left 15 dead on Saturday, a monitor said.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP that nine pro-Turkish fighters and six members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were killed in a zone between the towns of Tal Tamr and Ras al-Ain.

State news agency SANA said earlier Syrian government forces had entered the provincial borders of Ras al-Ain near Turkey's border on Saturday, an area that was taken by Turkish forces in the latter's weeks-long offensive against Syria's Kurds.

The Observatory said the Syrian government's deployment there was its largest in years.

Syrian government troops had also deployed along a road stretching some 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of the frontier, SANA said.

Turkey and its Syrian proxies on October 9 launched a cross-border attack against Kurdish-held areas, grabbing a 120-kilometre-long (70-mile) swathe of Syrian land along the frontier.

The incursion left hundreds dead and caused 300,000 people to flee their homes, in the latest humanitarian crisis in Syria's brutal eight-year war.

Turkey and Russia this week struck a deal in Sochi for more Kurdish forces to withdraw from the frontier on both sides of that Turkish-held area under the supervision of Russian and Syrian forces.

On Saturday, the Britain-based Observatory said some 2,000 Syrian troops and hundreds of military vehicles were deploying around what Turkey calls its "safe zone".

Government forces were being accompanied by Russian military police, the Observatory said.

Moscow has said 300 Russian military police had arrived in Syria to help ensure Kurdish forces withdraw to a line 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the border in keeping with Tuesday's agreement.

Under the Sochi deal, Kurdish forces have until late Tuesday to withdraw from border areas at either end of the Turkish-held area, before joint Turkish-Russian patrols start in a 10-kilometre (six-mile) strip there.

Ankara eventually wants to set up a buffer zone on Syrian soil along the entire length of its 440-kilometre-long border, including to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.

The SDF has objected to some provisions of the Sochi agreement and it has so far maintained several border posts.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Saturday that Ankara would "clear terrorists" on its border if the Kurdish forces, which his country view as an offshoot of its own banned insurgency, did not withdraw by the deadline.

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

"‘Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission"


Michael Crowley

27 OCTOBER 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has offered several justifications for an American withdrawal from Syria.

He has dismissed the country as nothing but “sand and death,” discounted its American-backed Kurdish fighters as “no angels,” and argued that he is winding down “endless wars.”


But in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.

He has declared that the United States has “secured” oil fields in the country’s chaotic northeast and suggested that the seizure of the country’s main natural resource justifies America further extending its military presence there.

“We have taken it and secured it,” Mr. Trump said of Syria’s oil during remarks at the White House on Sunday, after announcing the killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Mr. Trump went on to remind his audience of how, during the Iraq war, he called for selling off Iraq’s oil to defray the conflict’s enormous cost.

“I said keep the oil,” Mr. Trump recounted.

“If they are going into Iraq, keep the oil."

"They never did."

"They never did.”

Trump’s message is puzzling to former government officials and Middle East analysts who say that controlling Syria’s oil fields — which are the legal property of the Syrian government — poses numerous practical, legal and political obstacles.

They also warn that Mr. Trump’s discourse, which revives language he often used during the 2016 campaign to widespread condemnation, could confirm the world’s worst suspicions about American motives in the region.

A Russian Defense Ministry official on Saturday denounced Mr. Trump’s action as “state banditry.”

“He has a short notebook of old pledges, and this was one of the most frequently repeated pledges during the campaign: that we were going to take the oil,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official who served as a Middle East adviser to several presidents.


“And now he actually is in a position where he can quote, take some oil.”

Pentagon officials said on Friday that the United States would deploy several hundred troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated boasts that he is bringing American soldiers home from Syria.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that the United States would “maintain a reduced presence in Syria to deny ISIS access to oil revenue,” leaving what military officials said would be about 500 troops in the country, down from about 2,000 a year ago.

Mr. Trump first spoke approvingly about the United States seizing foreign oil in April 2011, when he complained about President Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal from Iraq.

“I would take the oil,” Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal.

“I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.”

He elaborated in an interview with ABC News a few days later.

“In the old days, you know, when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils,” he said.

“You go in."

"You win the war and you take it.”

That year, Mr. Trump endorsed the United States seizing oil reserves not only in Iraq, but also in Libya, where Mr. Obama had recently intervened in the country’s civil war.

“I would just go in and take the oil,” he told Fox News.

“We’re a bunch of babies."

"We have wars and we leave."

"We go in, we have wars, we lose lives, we lose money, and we leave.”

Once he took office, Mr. Trump largely dropped the idea until recently, when it re-emerged after his widely criticized decision to remove American troops from northeastern Syria who had been helping Kurdish militias battle the remnants of the Islamic State in the region.

The move effectively gave Turkey a greenlight to invade the area and push back those Kurds, whom the Turks viewed as a threat to their security.

His change in thinking follows multiple conversations with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who talks frequently with the president and has long pushed for a greater American presence in Syria, for reasons like fighting the Islamic State in the region and checking the influence of Russia and Iran.

Mr. Trump has also consulted on the subject with the former Army vice chief of staff, Jack Keane, who visited the White House in mid-October and showed the president a map of Syria illustrating that 70 percent of the country’s oil fields are in areas in the northeast that have been under American control.

Mr. Keane, who declined to comment, has also warned that the oil fields risk falling into the hands of Iranian proxies in the region.

Mr. Graham, too, contends that American control of the oil fields would “deny Iran and Assad a monetary windfall,” as he put it in a statement last week.

But Mr. Graham has taken the argument a step further, to suggest that Syrian oil could go into American coffers, as Mr. Trump once implied for Iraq.

“We can also use some of the revenue from oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria,” Mr. Graham added.

Last week, Mr. Trump offered a variation on that idea, saying that “we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, they have some cash flow.”

He added that he might “get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”

But energy and security experts say it is unlikely that any American companies would be interested in the enormous risks and limited profits such an arrangement would entail.

Even at its peak, Syrian oil production was modest.

And any short-term revenue potential is severely limited by logistical challenges posed by infrastructure damaged by war, pipelines that run into unfriendly areas and the unusually low grade of the oil itself.

Talk of monetizing the Syrian oil also diverges from the message of top Trump administration officials, including Mr. Esper, who said last week that the American mission in Syria was unchanged from its original purpose of defeating the Islamic State.

But the president has repeatedly boasted that the militant group has already been defeated.

And although ISIS currently controls no territory, and is little threat to the oil reserves, experts warn that it could regenerate.

Framing control of oil as part of the fight against ISIS, however, may provide cover for an action motivated, at least in part, for reasons that analysts say have no basis in domestic or international law.

“Esper is being very careful to say this is about ISIS."

"And that’s because the legality is being framed around ISIS,” said Aaron Stein, an expert on Syria and Turkey with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

When the Obama administration sent troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State several years ago, it relied on the authorization of military force passed by Congress days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which gave the government broad authority to battle Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.

The Trump administration has invoked the same authorization for its own activities in Syria, despite many critics arguing that even the previous administration overreached in citing it to cover the battle against the Islamic State in Syria.

Then there is the basic question of the oil’s ownership.

“Oil, like it or not, is owned by the Syrian state,” Brett H. McGurk, Mr. Trump’s former envoy to the 70-nation coalition to defeat ISIS, said at a panel discussion on Syria hosted Monday by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.


Mr. McGurk said that Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, had studied the issue and concluded there was no practical way for the United States to monetize its control over oil-rich areas.

“Maybe there are new lawyers now, but it was just illegal for an American company to go and seize and exploit these assets,” Mr. McGurk said.

Mr. McGurk said the only legal way to make money from the Syrian oil fields would be to work with Russia and the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to place the revenue into an escrow account to help fund Syria’s postwar reconstruction.

But he said Russia had little interest in the idea, even before America assumed a diminished role in the country this month.

Nor has Mr. Trump expressed any public interest in using the oil to fund Syria’s reconstruction.

Mr. Stein said he believed the true goal of some Trump administration officials and advisers was to keep the oil fields not from ISIS but from Mr. Assad’s forces, to deny him funds to rebuild his country and thus ensure that Syria remained a financial burden on its ally, Iran.

In recent days, hostile foreign governments have seized on Mr. Trump’s commentary as evidence of America’s sinister motives.

On Saturday, a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said that “what Washington is doing now, the seizure and control of oil fields in eastern Syria under its armed control, is, quite simply, international state banditry.”

And Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency wrote that while Washington “claims that the move is in the line with its alleged antiterror campaign in Syria, analysts see it no more than an excuse to impose control over Syria’s oil revenues.”

Mr. Riedel doubted that the president would wind up insisting on control of the oil fields.

Beyond the many military, technical and legal challenges, there are the optics to consider.

“Let’s say he does do it,” Mr. Riedel said.

“Let’s say we establish the precedent that we are in the Middle East to take the oil."

"The symbolism is really bad.”

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Re: THE MIDDLE EAST

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THE WASHINGTON POST

"Dread in northern Syria as U.S. troops withdraw and cease-fire ends"


Louisa Loveluck

30 OCTOBER 2019

DERIK, Syria —As the final hours of a cease-fire in northeastern Syria wound down on Tuesday, dread descended on a region once shielded by the United States.

In towns and cities, families debated, and sometimes fought, over whether, and where, to run.


Selling their houses to pay for the help of unpredictable smugglers was one option.

Moving closer to the Iraqi border, where thousands of refugees had already crossed, and then praying the violence wouldn’t follow, was another.

“How do you decide what to do?"

"Do we wait, do we leave?” asked a young student, Marwa, in the Syrian border town of Derik.

“There are no good options."

"None.”

The end of the 150-hour cease-fire brokered by Russia threatened to reignite fighting that erupted after President Trump decided earlier this month to withdraw U.S. troops from the area and leave their Kurdish allies to fend for themselves in the face of a Turkish military offensive.

The temporary pause in hostilities also gave the various belligerents time to redraw the map of northern Syria and confront its residents with new realities and new risks.

As the mostly Syrian Kurdish fighters pulled back from the Turkish border, the Turkish military and its militia allies advanced from the north and Syrian government forces advanced from the south, retaking territory that had changed hands during the eight-year civil war.

The largely Kurdish communities of northeastern Syria feared both: their longtime Turkish adversaries and Syrian government forces that could view the locals as turncoats.

“The men feel strong, the women and children are scared, and no one knows what is coming,” said Jawan, 34, standing in Derik’s clothing bazaar, holding his 9-month-old daughter.

“This is bigger than us, really."

"America was meant to protect us, but that’s done now."

"So I guess we’ll just wait.”

While U.S. troops withdrew to the south and out of the area where they’d long kept the peace, Russian military police moved in.

Under an agreement reached last week between Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Russian forces would now patrol the border.

At times, American and Russian armored vehicles passed on the road, each with their own red, white and blue flags flapping in the wind.

Shortly before the cease-fire expired on Tuesday evening, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that a “full implementation” of the Russian-Turkish deal — which called for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to retreat from the border area — had been achieved.

The Russian Defense Ministry, citing Major Gen. Yuri Borenkov, a senior military official working in Syria, said that 68 Kurdish units numbering 34,000 fighters had pulled back 19 miles from the border by Tuesday.

The only publicized withdrawal during the pause in Turkey’s offensive took place Sunday near the border town of Amuda, with the SDF waiting an hour for a Russian escort to arrive and lead the fighters south.

A group of children displaced from Ras al-Ayn, site of the worst fighting, had looked on.

And civilians stopped their cars to ask what might follow.

“Give us good news,” an old man implored Mustafa Bali, an SDF spokesman, clutching his hand.

Around the border towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Tamr, violence flared during the final hours of the cease-fire, suggesting that not all Kurdish fighters had withdrawn and that Turkish-backed troops were scrambling to seal control of the most contested areas.

Days earlier, as shells thudded in the background, a convoy of U.S. trucks moved along the roads of northern Syria, transporting troops, equipment and the paraphernalia of what had once been a busy military base.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Monday that the U.S. forces were being repositioned to secure oil fields in eastern Syria and make sure the Islamic State could not gain access to them.

This redeployment was a pivot from Trump’s earlier statement that U.S. troops were being sent home.

The shift in mission sowed confusion among the largely Kurdish forces and civilians.

“So they are leaving us for oil?” asked one man in a clinic Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he said he now feared for his security if he spoke to American journalists.

“We heard for years that all America cared about was oil, but we didn’t believe it, and we thought the Americans were our friends."

"Now what do we have left?”


After Trump announced his decision to withdraw U.S. troops, clearing the way for Turkey’s military campaign, hundreds of fighters and civilians have been killed.

About 200,000 people have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.

Trump’s decision marked a watershed moment in a long American effort to hold sway over parts of a Syria racked by the eight-year conflict.

As a largely peaceful uprising gave way to civil war, Washington opposed President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal, repressive tactics and supported an array of rebel groups.

But as the Islamic State rose and nationwide violence accelerated, northeastern Syria’s Kurdish-led force had become Washington’s favored, and finally their only, partner.

Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops away from the region has set the stage for a major shift in power here, with Russians ascendant and the Syrian Kurds turning to Assad’s forces for protection from Turkey.

In a sign of how marbled the battlefield has become, Syrian government forces have returned to fighting on the front lines in northeastern Syria, and they have suffered a stream of casualties in recent days.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least six Syrian government troops had been killed near Assadiya, south of Ras al-Ayn.

There were also reports that the Turkish-backed force had kidnapped and executed another soldier.

At a medical facility in Hasakah, three soldiers lay wounded and riddled with shrapnel.

One was unconscious and on life support.

His facial features had almost been burned off, a doctor said.

Mostly young, local and poorly equipped, soldiers interviewed across two medical facilities said that they had been sitting ducks in the face of Turkey’s heavy weapons.

“And we don’t have heavy weapons, just these guns,” said one Syrian government soldier, clutching a battered rifle.

He paced the yard at a Kurdish Red Crescent clinic in Tal Tamr while his friend was being treated inside for a gunshot wound to the chest.

The soldier watched as the latest ambulance pulled through the gates and medics wrenched open the door.

It was another Syrian government soldier.

The young man froze, then bolted to help.

“My brother, my brother,” he cried.

“What happened?”

louisa.loveluck@washpost.com

Ossama Mohammed contributed to this report.

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