A long-feared war between Turkey and the Kurds has finally erupted over the past ten days in northwestern Syria, with the former having launched a combined air and ground assault across its Syrian frontier in the euphemistically dubbed "Operation Olive Branch", threatening to eventually engulf the entire northern border of Syria with Turkey in a brand-new phase of conflict in what was once a unified state under the Baathist rule of the Assad family, but which now appears on the verge of a permanent partition of some kind. Such a partition, however, is highly likely to cement Russia's dominant role in the country - at the expense, of course, of the United States.
The latest developments have transpired, it seems, as a consequence of Washington ignoring the objections of all the sovereign states involved - Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Syria itself - in announcing its intent to set up a large new Kurdish border security force in northern Syria drawn from the YPG Peshmerga militia that formed the cream of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which liberated most of the eastern bank of the Euphrates in the country from ISIS (with US air support) since 2016. Though Washington wasn't diplomatically forthright about its reasons, the universal assumption was that the Pentagon had won the argument with the State Department about the absolute necessity of keeping both US special forces and US-backed Kurdish militants in charge of an essentially independent Kurdish state as a check on Iran's designs in Syria and the Levant.
In doing so, the US killed Russia's plans to include the Kurds in peace talks with Iran and Turkey on the future of Syria which Moscow hoped would result in a kind of permanent Kurdish federation within the country similar to that of Iraqi Kurdistan - one that gave the Kurds a large degree of local autonomy in terms of law enforcement and basic security functions, but which required them to ultimately defer to Damascus for national legitimacy, recognition, and defense.
Tellingly, the unilateral US move to create the 30,000-strong Peshmerga frontier force occurred despite what must have been intensive behind-the-scenes diplomacy by the Russians to ensure that American troops would be allowed to remain in the Kurdish federation even as it was reintegrated into the Syrian state - over vehement Syrian government objections and needless to say Iranian concerns.
In the end, it seems that the relevant planners in Washington determined that they simply could not share any real estate with Assad - whom they regard as ever before as Iran's proxy on the Mediterranean whose rule must be undermined in any way possible, however long it takes.
But this calculus has now backfired on the US spectacularly - and things may only get worse for them if the Americans and their allies in Syrian Kurdistan, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), don't reverse course. Despite having retracted the proposal for the Kurdish border force, Washington can't take back what clearly remains its intent - an open-ended de facto Kurdish state under its own protection - and this fact simply isn't lost on Turkey, whose increasingly autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increasingly stunned his nominal American ally and patron with his bellicosity towards the PYD for its supposed sympathies with the anti-Turkish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK); a hostility so deep it has led him to willingly collude not just with Russia but also (albeit in a small and mostly covert manner) Iran.
It now appears that Ankara is demanding a 20-to-30 mile-deep security buffer zone inside Syrian Kurdistan beyond its southern border across the entire length of the Syrian Kurdish federation known as Rojava - which is principally east of the upper Euphrates River as it descends towards Mesopotamia from the Anatolian highlands. This would necessarily uproot Kurdish militias and untold numbers of Kurdish civilians that don't want to live under Turkish rule and basically enshrine Turkey's role as a preemptive invader and occupier of a neighboring sovereign state - despite the fact that it will most likely utilize its Syrian Arab rebel proxies, who have mostly fought to overthrow Assad since the onset of the 2011 Syrian revolution and civil war, to put a Syrian face on its activities in a sizeable area that it has no desire to formally annex.
But because the US simply cannot accede to such an outlandish land grab even by a critical regional ally, Turkey is ratcheting up the pressure by threatening to first expel the entire Kurdish presence west of the Euphrates - that is to say, that which is a more proximate irritant to its frontier. Hence, Erdogan has moved first to liquidate the small Kurdish pocket in the extreme northwest of Syria of Afrin Canton - which has been boxed in by his forces since their late 2016 "Operation Euphrates Shield" that drove ISIS out of the section of Syrian frontier immediately west of the great river, as well as a more recent minor thrust to cut off the Afrin sector from the main Turkish-backed anti-Assad rebel enclave of Idlib province to the south.
But Afrin would appear to be just the start: Turkey now appears eager to complete the Euphrates Shield gambit altogether - by taking the city of Manbij just beyond its Syrian enclave on the western bank, the first major urban area that the US-led SDF retook from ISIS over the objections of Ankara, which viewed the predominantly Sunni Arab city as fit to be liberated only by its own proxies, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the "moderate" jihadist rebels. In recent days, Turkey has brazenly issued threats to US forces still stationed in and around Manbij in support of their Kurdish YPG allies: should Americans be caught in the crossfire, so the Turks seem to be declaring, it will be their fault for not recognizing that Kurdish militants must now be entirely confined to the east of the Euphrates.
This would appear to be Erdogan's final warning to the Trump administration that its demands for a border-long anti-Kurdish buffer must be taken seriously, or else Turkey will make US efforts to contain Iran in Syria all that much harder - the fall of Manbij would rob Washington of its only real foothold that could put pressure on Assad's "useful Syria" of the western spine, given that it's in eastern Aleppo province; the only other significant US-Kurdish presence west of the Euphrates is considerably further downstream to the east and south, around former ISIS capital Raqqa, which poses less of a direct threat to the regime core.
But even more than signaling his extreme displeasure, Erdogan is also seeking to call the US and especially the Trump administration out on what could well be Washington's last bluff in its long involvement in the Syrian war - the actual lengths to which the tottering Anglo-Zionist empire is willing to go to contain Iran. In Erdogan's view, if the US were actually serious about checking Iran, it should have no problem sacrificing the Kurds on the northern Syrian frontier on the altar of Turkish anger in order to keep a far more powerful partner - Turkey - on board against Assad.
To drive home this point, Ankara is now making no secret of its collusion with Tehran in the Afrin operation and threatened thrust at Manbij as well; in both cases, it has appeared to coordinate its air and artillery attacks with agreed-upon pullouts of token Syrian regime forces as well as Russian special ops which also happen to be present. Because of the close military operational unity of the Russian, Iranian, and Assad regime war efforts on the ground - even despite Moscow's divergent diplomatic push to resolve the conflict compared to the latter two - this is a clear signal to Washington that Turkey now actually holds the biggest trump cards (no pun intended) to scuttle its seemingly desperate bid to keep Iran from doing most whatever it pleases in Syria.
But it's quite easy to see who the real winner is: Putin's Russia. As events continue to unfold, few Syrian Kurds will not help noticing that America's promises of protection to them post-ISIS are turning out to be largely hollow; automatically, this forces them to reconsider their options of a deeper partnership with the Russians instead.
Because the US has so little leverage to rein in its unruly Turkish ally - alienating it from NATO would be a massive self-goal to Russia - it's highly unlikely that Ankara can be sufficiently appeased in any way that does not leave the Syrian Kurds' hard-won Rojava federation effectively at its mercy. Should the Kurds be disarmed, they will be defenseless against chronic harassment on the frontier by Erdogan's forces; should they remain armed, Erdogan almost certainly requires in exchange that his own troops - or at least his Syrian Arab rebel proxies aided by Turkish special forces and air power - be allowed to utilize and traverse the Kurdish territory freely in order to bolster the anti-Assad (i.e. anti-Iranian) front along the Euphrates further south and east within Syria (most of which is Sunni Arab tribal territory that should have been retaken from ISIS by Turkish-backed Sunni Arab rebels, not Kurds, in the first place). In coming days, if the Turks compel a US withdrawal from Manbij, not only would it mean that their demands haven't been met in a last-minute deal, but it would also give them the green light to force the US out of sections of the main Rojava boundary with Turkey as well.
That would leave the Kurds nowhere to go but the Kremlin to enlist a counterweight against Erdogan's neo-Ottoman expansionism - for obvious reasons, they are too fearful of returning outright into Assad's fold. But all Putin can do is rehash what he's pretty much been telling them all along: make your peace with Assad as soon as possible, to secure the best possible terms to return final rule over your federation to Damascus - because hell will have to freeze over before the Americans are willing to fight to save you from both Assad and Erdogan. The two may utterly despise each other, but when they collude against an even more hated common threat - Anglo-Zionism and its local proxies - they'll quickly forget the bad blood as they work in hammer-and-anvil fashion against the hapless victim sandwiched between them.
Alas, the Syrian Kurds - like their Iraqi brethren last October - are now finding out the hard way that Washington has been talking a much bigger game than it's actually willing or even capable of playing, and that Moscow is the new power broker to truly reckon with in the region. With the new Turkish-Kurdish war, Russia has checkmated the US in Syria - and the ramifications will be felt far beyond it and for quite some time.
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