NP: Syria, part 10

[jody2.718]

Last Thursday, Vice-President [Mike Pence](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/the-danger-of-president-pence), after a hastily arranged trip to Ankara, announced a five-day ceasefire. The terms of the agreement give Erdoğan exactly what he wanted: Turkey claims that the S.D.F. has to retreat twenty miles along three hundred miles of the Turkish border, in order to create a buffer—a “safe zone”—for Turkey. Trump took a kind of perverse credit for the ceasefire. “What Turkey is getting now is they’re not going to have to kill millions of people,” he said. Where exactly the Kurds would go—or whether Turkish troops would stay—remained unclear.

The deal immediately appeared tenuous. The Turkish foreign minister said that Turkey had agreed only to a “pause”—not a ceasefire—“for the terrorists to leave.” General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the S.D.F. commander, said in an interview that his troops would begin to withdraw only along the sixty-mile border where the Turks invaded. The Kurds, he said, “are not leaving the lands and graves of their grandfathers.” Brett McGurk, who resigned last year as the U.S. special envoy for the coalition fighting isis, said that the safe-zone plan is “totally non-implementable.” He added, “This is Erdoğan’s fantasy scenario, and it includes, of course, nearly all the Kurdish, Assyrian-Christian, and other minority areas of Syria.”

The impact of Trump’s decisions—on the campaign against isis, on the balance of power in the Middle East, and on America’s image globally—can’t be undone by the deal that Pence negotiated. “I don’t understand how, in any way, the U.S. is better off on the ground,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “It’s a question of when, not if, American forces will have to return to the region to deal with a reconstituted isis.” And, just as Trump was abandoning the most effective campaign ever conducted against jihadi extremists, he committed some three thousand troops to Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the ideology that spawned Sunni jihadism, including Al Qaeda—a movement that was inflamed when the U.S. stationed troops in the Kingdom during the first Gulf War.

The Kurds, left stranded, turned to the Syrian government for military help. President Bashar al-Assad regained control of more territory in a day than he had in years of fighting Syria’s civil war. Russian troops, who are propping up Assad’s regime, also moved in. A Russian journalist posted a video from a strategic U.S. base in Manbij—once the hub where foreign isis fighters plotted attacks on five continents—showing food left uneaten on plates in the mess hall and cans of Coke in a refrigerator. The American withdrawal coincided with Vladimir Putin’s arrival in Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia appreciates the active role of the Russian Federation in the region and the world,” King Salman said last Monday, welcoming him. During the Turkish offensive, Putin invited Erdoğan to Moscow. Turkey’s agreement to a pause expires on October 22nd, the day that Erdoğan will meet with the Russian President.

Trump’s actions are already raising questions about America’s trustworthiness. “Partnership is a principal way we establish and maintain influence, particularly as we strive to maintain a competitive advantage against our great-power rivals,” General Joseph Votel, who retired in March as the head of the U.S. Central Command, said. “It is hard to see how this policy decision will contribute to that end.” Trump claimed that he withdrew to avoid being sucked into another “endless” Middle East war. He may instead have facilitated one. ♦

Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “[Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439103178/?tag=thneyo0f-20).”

Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.