US leaving northern Syria to the Turks (also leaving them in charge of the captured ISIS fighters)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

On the ground in northern Syria in the perilous weeks after Trump’s military withdrawal (Rolling Stone)

Quote

The hard-won calm was shattered in early October. Khalaf’s car sped through a countryside once again under bombardment. Less than a week earlier, following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump ordered all U.S. military forces to withdraw from Syria, effectively greenlighting the attack on the Kurds. Turkey had already launched limited military operations along the border in 2016 and 2018 but had been held in check by the American presence. They viewed the Kurds’ main force, the YPG, as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which it considers a terrorist group. Turkey’s declared intention is to create a 20-mile-deep, 300-mile-long “safe zone” in Kurdish lands, to buffer Turkish territory and resettle millions of Syrian war refugees. But people fear a more malevolent goal. “It has to be understood,” says Kurdish journalist Mohammed A. Salih, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, “as a deliberate act of setting up the Kurds and religious minorities in northeastern Syria for ethnic cleansing.”

 

[Jason]