Post and courier
President Trump has decided to provide arms and ammunition to a Kurdish-dominated militia in Syria known as the YPG. He has done so despite the fact that our NATO ally Turkey vehemently opposes the move.
Turkey rightly considers the group an offshoot of the revolutionary, Communist-inspired Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has carried out a 30-year-long civil war in Turkey and has long been designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, NATO and the United States.
The president, on the other hand, rightly considers the YPG the most effective boots on the ground in Syria against Islamic State, and is preparing it for the coming battles to eradicate Islamic State control of Syrian territory.
The gamble Mr. Trump is taking is that he may be endangering Turkish support in the battle against Islamic State and the effort to broker a settlement of the Syrian civil war. U.S. and other NATO warplanes need the use of the Turkish Air Force base at Incirlik to carry out operations in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State, and Turkey may feel so strongly about arming the YPG that it closes the base to foreign operations.
There is plenty of evidence that the YPG has many fighters from the Turkish PKK and other Kurdish factions and that among the group’s military aims has been an attempt to control the Turkish-Syrian border and form a contiguous area with Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The arms provided the YPG have a very good chance of being used to support the PKK against the government of Turkey unless the United States can find a way to prevent it.
The PKK declared ceasefires in its armed struggle in 2000-2005 and again in 2013, but in 2015 it took advantage of the turmoil in the Middle East to break the most recent ceasefire and conduct terrorist bombings in Turkey. The Assad government in Syria long allowed the PKK to operate in Turkey from Syrian bases in pursuit of an independent Kurdistan.
Trump, in arming the Kurds, may be taking the short way to victory over Islamic State, but this nation’s long-term interests require good relations with Turkey. That is true even though the policies of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appear to be in conflict with basic American democratic values.
The means that Mr. Trump has to find ways to mollify President Erdogan and, to the extent possible, insure that U.S. weapons are not used against our NATO ally. One possibility to explore is whether YPG militia could persuade the PKK to call off its current campaign against Turkey and return to the negotiating table. Other options, including closer military cooperation, must be explored.
There is no avoiding the fact that Turkey will play a major role in any Middle East settlement, and that no matter how effective the Kurdish fighters are, the United States must find common ground with President Erdogan on the region’s future.