<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

U.S. backpedals on new Kurdish force

By Liz Sly, The Washington Post
Published: January 18, 2018, 9:50pm

BEIRUT — The Trump administration is backtracking on its description of a planned new security force in northeastern Syria amid escalating threats by Turkey to launch a cross-border assault against the Kurdish group involved.

U.S. officials had originally described it as a “Border Security Force” that would guard the perimeter of the self-proclaimed Kurdish enclave taking shape in northeastern Syria.

It would also effectively cement the emerging status of the Kurdish-led entity, which is modeled on the vision of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader jailed for terrorism in Turkey.

Ocalan is the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is fighting a guerrilla insurgency against Turkey and is closely allied with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG in Syria.

The YPG is in turn the lead component of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which was created in 2015 to fight the Islamic State and now controls northeast Syria.

Reports of the planned new force provoked an outcry in Turkey, whose leaders have long accused the United States of enabling terrorism by supporting the Kurds in Syria. Iran has also expressed displeasure and on Thursday the Syrian government said it would exert all its efforts to end what it called the “illegitimate” U.S. presence in Syria, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

Turkey has meanwhile dispatched tanks and troops to the Syrian border, where they appear poised to launch an attack on another Kurdish-controlled enclave outside the area where the United States maintains troops.

Confronted with the prospect of an imminent war that could draw in the United States and force Washington to choose between two important allies, U.S. officials have been hastily recalibrating their descriptions of the force.

The force “was not properly described,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday after meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

“It’s unfortunate that entire situation has been mis-portrayed, mis-described, some people misspoke,” he said. “We are not creating a border security force at all.”

Rather, he said, the U.S. military will provide training to local elements to help secure areas that were liberated from the Islamic State, with U.S. assistance, over the past three years.

The U.S. military said in a statement emailed to journalists that the force would be “internally focused.”

“This is not a new ‘army’ or conventional ‘border guard’ force,” the statement said. “These security forces are internally-focused to prevent Daesh fighters from fleeing Syria. These forces will augment local security in liberated areas and protect local populations,” the statement said, referring to ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

Whether the semantics will be enough to head off the threatened Turkish assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin is unclear, however. Turkey has been warning for more than a year that it will attack the enclave in northwest Syria.

Loading...