#turkey invaded & took control of the city in early 2018

[navramanan]

Anytime i'm reminded of afrîn it fills me with incredible dread.

[antoine-roquentin]

The new troop deployment, which has not been previously reported, is part of an expanding series of military and diplomatic steps the United States has taken in recent weeks to defuse escalating tensions with Turkey, a NATO ally, over American support for Syrian Kurdish fighters. Those fighters led the ground war against the Islamic State, a shared enemy, but Turkey considers them terrorists.

The United States currently has just under 1,000 troops in Syria, mainly to help stamp out remaining pockets of Islamic State fighters.

Turkey threatened last month to invade northeast Syria to rout the Syrian Kurds from territory along the border they seized from the Islamic State. In response, the Pentagon in recent weeks has rushed to both set up joint reconnaissance flights and ground patrols with Turkish forces in a narrow buffer zone inside Syria, and destroy Kurdish fortifications near the border that Turkey considered threatening. Two senior American generals met this week with their Turkish counterparts in Ankara, Turkey’s capital....

The United States and Turkey agreed in principle last month to establish a jointly patrolled zone for refugees along the border, but they are still negotiating the details and major differences remain.

Mr. Erdogan wants the zone to be 20 miles deep and run for 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border east of the Euphrates. The United States has limited Turkey’s access to a few miles. Syria has already called the plan a violation of its sovereignty and Russia emphasized the need to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity.

Mr. Erdogan threatened last month to carry out a major cross-border operation into Syria to rout the Syrian Kurds who took control there from ISIS. Turkey conducted previous missions into Afrin and Jarabulus west of the Euphrates River.

American officials expressed skepticism that the Turkish military could sustain such an extensive and complicated operation into northeastern Syria, but worried that any Turkish invasion would wreak havoc with American counterterrorism goals and its relations with a NATO ally.

Led by James F. Jeffrey, the State Department’s special representative for Syria, and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the two countries quickly worked out several steps to defuse tensions and focus on a 75-mile-long buffer zone between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, which the two sides agreed to and the Pentagon calls “the security mechanism area.”

The two militaries established a joint operations center in Ankara. They have conducted four joint reconnaissance flights over the area, including one on Thursday. And last weekend, American and Turkish troops conducted their first joint ground patrol.

In a sign of how diplomatic sensitivities are affecting the messaging behind these operations, the military’s news release about the first ground patrol showed one photograph with a Turkish vehicle in the lead and another with an American vehicle in the lead.

On Thursday, the Pentagon’s European command, which deals with Turkey, said that Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Twitty of the Army, the European command’s deputy commander, and Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson of the Air Force, Central Command’s No. 2 officer, had met with their Turkish counterparts to discuss future support for the combined joint operations.

“You can see the progress,” Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a spokesman for the American-led coalition overseeing operations in Iraq and Syria, said in a statement on Thursday, noting the delicate balance between addressing Turkey’s “legitimate security concerns” and the coalition’s efforts to combat ISIS.

But some political leaders on both sides characterized the measures as more akin to public relations than substantive steps, suggesting a difficult road ahead.

“There have been some joint patrols, yes, but steps taken beyond that … are only cosmetic,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Ankara this week.

Could Turkey use Syria safe zone to remake the area’s demographics? 

After Turkey seized the northwestern Syrian Kurdish district of Afrin in early 2018, its Syrian militia proxies, the Free Syrian Army, looted houses in broad daylight.

Throughout the ongoing occupation, Turkey has done nothing to prevent documented human rights violations, including the displacement of more than 100,000 native Afrin Kurds.

Turkey also oversaw the resettlement of displaced Arabs from elsewhere in Syria in vacated Kurdish homes. It has even given them residence permits to stay in the region. By doing so, it is creating new demographic facts on the ground in a region that has historically been overwhelmingly Kurdish.

The main regions of Syrian Kurdistan are situated east of the River Euphrates. After the Aug. 7 preliminary agreement between Turkey and the United States to create a safe zone in that area, the U.S. embassy in Ankara said, “that the safe zone shall become a peace corridor, and every effort shall be made so that displaced Syrians can return to their country.”

“The term peace corridor refers to two different animals: for Turkey, it’s the total elimination of PKK cadres in northern Syria; for the U.S., it is a workable solution to make both Turkey and the YPG/PKK avoid clashing,” Mustafa Gürbüz, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. “Unless a paradigm shift occurs on either side, it is impossible to have a long-term safe-zone agreement.”

Turkey frequently talks of its intention to send the majority of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees back to their homeland. This could mean resettling Syrian Arabs in Kurdish-majority areas, as it has done in Afrin, so as to destroy any contiguous Kurdish-majority region on Turkey’s border.

Turkey plans to resettle some 700,000 Syrian refugees in Kurdish-majority northeast Syria following the safe zone’s establishment. This is possibly part of a project to lessen the unpopular presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey and fundamentally change the demographics of northeast Syria in a similar fashion to the Syrian Baathist Arabisation drive of the 1960s and 1970s. That plan sought to repopulate Kurdish-majority areas on the Syrian border with Arabs to separate Syria’s Kurds from the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq, where Kurdish nationalism was on the rise.

The Syrian government planned to remove Kurds from a zone along the Syrian border with Turkey nine miles deep and 174 miles wide. It never fully materialised, though many Kurds were forcibly uprooted and their land resettled by some 4,000 Arab families.

Turkey may well see the safe zone as the first step to building a similar “Arab belt” along the border. The exact size and location of the safe zone is not yet clear. Turkey wants a 20-mile deep zone spanning the entire border while the United States has suggested a much smaller nine-mile deep zone. Turkey remains adamant that the zone should be no less than 20-miles deep and says it will launch a unilateral military operation if it does not get what it wants.

A zone that size would include all of Syrian Kurdistan’s major cities, many of which are close to the Turkish border, and would be unacceptable to the YPG and the multi-ethnic SDF umbrella force.

The United States may convince Turkey to instead settle for establishing the safe zone around the Arab-majority border town of Tel Abyad, where resettled Syrian Arab refugees may prove less contentious in Kurdish-majority areas.

“Kurds see Tel Abyad as a part of Syrian Kurdistan because it is one of the regions where the Arab belt project was implemented and the demographics there were changed decades ago,” said Mutlu Çiviroğlu, a Kurdish affairs analyst.

It is unclear whether the United State will be able to persuade Turkey to make significant concessions.

“The American team was convinced that Erdoğan was going to invade northern and eastern Syria,” said Nicholas Heras, Middle East security fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “There was an air of desperation from the American side during these talks that has not existed before.”

His party’s defeat in mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city and financial capital Istanbul shook the president, Heras said. Consequently, Erdoğan views the Syria issue “as a cornucopia that he can use to satisfy the Turkish body politic that he senses is turning against him”.

“The American team believed that Erdoğan was going to invade, push out the SDF from a large swathe of the border, and nearly simultaneously move refugees into the void,” Heras said. “What is really bothering the American side is a belief that there could still be a moment when U.S. and other coalition forces will need to fire on Turkish troops in order to protect the SDF.”

Heras said there had been a quiet war between the U.S. State Department that wanted to give the Turks more room to operate in SDF areas, and the U.S. military that was pushing back hard.

“Neither the Turks nor the Americans have agreed to much, except to keep talking,” he said. “But that is a win for both the U.S. military and the SDF, because the longer the Turks are kept at bay, the less likely Turkey can pull off an invasion.”

Heras doubted the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army would be able to operate in any safe zone, noting that they had “no protection whatsoever from coalition forces”.

“U.S.-led coalition forces in northern and eastern Syria have almost no trust for Turkey’s Syrian rebel proxies,” he said. “If they try to operate in SDF areas, they will be shot.”

in addition to erdogan’s previous electoral troubles, turkey stands to see an influx of maybe over a million syrian refugees in the next year. the syrian government has been slowly but surely pushing into idlib with heavy use of bombings to clear cities and prevent casualty-heavy urban warfare that would be unpopular among syrian citizens. the advance has been slow, but nearly all of hama has been retaken and there’s now a desire to seize the economically important m5 highway between damascus and aleppo. idlib is now where the most hardcore syrian opposition supporters reside, and should it fall, most will flee across the border rather than stay in the area. by pre-emptively clearing space for resettlement, turkey hopes to take care of that problem as well as potentially push the boundaries of turkey into syria, appeasing nationalist sentiment.