Shining the Spotlight on US Abandoning Kurdish Allies in Afrin

Rasa - Turkey has announced that their illegal invasion of Northern Syria is going to be expanded eastward, all the way to the Iraqi border, a threat most analysts and experts believe would never come true.

News ID: 436175

Date: 31 January 2018 - 14:21

RNA - Washington has expressed sort of opposition to the decision. NATO nations have also been expressing growing disquiet about the risk of direct conflict between two of their most substantial member nations, and are saying the US and Turkey have been working hard to avoid direct conflict within Afrin District. That’s been made quite a bit simpler by the fact that the US, though its occupying troops are illegally embedded in Syrian Kurdish territory, are not generally believed to be in Afrin in the first place. Once and if the Turkish forces move onward to Manbij and elsewhere that will no longer be the case. So here we go again:

A- Western media outlets say US calls to keep the war confined to Afrin and Turkey’s warnings that the US troops would be targeted if they keep helping the Kurds, point to this being the tip of a potentially calamitous iceberg, with both nations determined not to let the other dictate their Syria policy. Even in doing so they won’t steer themselves into a direct confrontation. That will never happen.

B- There has been a lot of evidence in Iraq that when necessary Washington will surely abandon the Syrian Kurds. Even now the US sits idle while the Turkish government proceeds with bombardment of Afrin in Northern Syria. The argument is that Washington is not in Syria to serve the Kurds. It is there to protect its illicit interests.

C- If the US is to truly stand for international law and democracy as it claims, it must be decisive in protecting Afrin as well as the other two Kurdish regions in Syria. To abandon the Kurdish people now is to once and for all forsake any historical claims America has as a defender of democracy.

D- President Trump has promised his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the US will no longer provide weapons to the YPG. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu has welcomed Trump's guarantee, saying Turkey wants to see the decision being implemented. Guess what? This is a done deal as America sits idle watching Turkey bomb its Kurdish allies.

E- Washington can never imagine NATO without Turkey. They need Turkey to counter Russia’s influence in the region and at the same time contain the flow of migrants and refugees from the Middle East to Western Europe. That’s a long-term strategic alliance. Besides, they cannot feel outraged morally because their Turkish ally is murdering their Kurdish allies from the air by F-16s and tanks they sold to Turkey.

F- President Erdogan clearly knows he can contravene US interests without consequence. His insurance policy is the country’s geographical location. Throughout the Cold War, Turkey’s proximity to the Soviet Union made it a great base for NATO troops and missiles. The US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan assured that the air base at Incirlik remained crucial to American military efforts. Even President Trump is in the know that Turkey is still a nice place to have a troop presence.

G- The Syrian government and its allies, including Iran, eventually overcame US efforts to regime change the nation, and Kurdish fighters are now paying for siding with war-party Washington. While Iran and Russia back the Syrian government against various terrorist groups and separatists, the US supports an irregular coalition of regime change mercenaries, made up mostly of Kurds and Al-Qaeda affiliates. Despite the group's recent successes in storming ISIL's de facto capital of Raqqa, the game is finished for US plans to overthrow President Bashar Assad or compete with Iran's success in post-ISIL Syria.

In summation, tensions between Washington and its Kurdish allies will continue to rise on multiple fronts. Siding with the US, clearly, has turned out to be a grave mistake for the Kurds. All the evidence in Afrin suggests that US support for Kurds will soon disappear, as it did in post-invasion Iraq.

The Pentagon regime will never defend the Kurds against Turkish forces. What the US is doing with the Kurds should surprise no one. The Syrian Kurds made their biggest mistake in trusting Washington. The US wants Kurds only to the extent that they fight the Damascus government and prove useful in partitioning the country into smaller states. But when it comes to others, the US becomes a completely strange party to the Kurds. Loyalty is apparently a word that finds its meaning only in the East, as everything is for sales in the West.

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