Kurds should capitalize on sympathy stirred by new Syria crisis
Had the two leaders not made the infamous December 14 telephone conversation that purportedly inspired Trump's tweet announcing a US troop withdrawal from Syria, the massive outpouring of moral support for Syrian Kurds from Western capitals and the Washington establishment would perhaps never have occurred. But more about the bright side later.
In the immediate term, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), which governs over a quarter of war-torn Syrian territory, has to gird for all kinds of catastrophic scenarios, from a barely disguised Turkish invasion to a tightening of Syrian coercive measures. Whether or not the US president changes his mind again, the Western-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) clearly cannot count on American support for the rest of Trump's presidency.
With any luck, the Turks and their local proxies will not rush into the area with indecent haste and end up destabilizing the only part of Syria that has a semblance of law, order, and stability, not to mention the richest oil fields. The hope also is that the French and British forces already present in the Kurdish-controlled portion will act as a deterrent against the designs of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Russia.
The SDC decision to send a team to Paris to ask France to fill the gap that will be left by the withdrawing Americans may well be a case of too little too late. But, for their part, European countries, including Germany, should not sit idly by as if they are incapable of doing their bit in the wake of what Carl Bildt, the European Council on Foreign Relations co-chair, summed up as "a morning of alarm in Europe."
Hypothetically speaking, replacement of the US contingent by elite troops from the Kurds' European and Arab partners could be a blessing in disguise for the local population, who in any case had been living in fear and anxiety since Trump announced at a rally in Ohio in March that "very soon, we're coming out."
Also, until the outcry sparked by Trump's latest announcement, few in the international community had perhaps noticed the sheer meanness of his decision to not spend the $230 million that had been set aside for recovery efforts in northeastern Syria.
US officials had then claimed the freeze on aid meant for areas cleared of ISIS would be offset by $300 million pledged by coalition partners, including $100 million by Saudi Arabia, when the extra money could have actually supplemented the stabilization efforts. Now that the balance of power has tilted abruptly in favour of the Syrian Kurds' foes, whether the pledged sums would materialize is open to question.
While the security challenges thrust on the SDF by the imminent US withdrawal are undoubtedly grave, to view the situation as all doom and gloom would be to miss the big picture. With one tweet, Trump inadvertently unlocked an enormous reservoir of goodwill not just for Syrian Kurds but presumably the Middle East's entire Kurdish population spread across four countries.
Public memory can be short, but it is evidently not so in regard to the Kurds' sacrifices – about 4,000 dead and 10,000 wounded – since the launch of the international coalition campaign to defeat ISIS in 2015. Moreover, it is clear that the SDF's ongoing campaign to root out ISIS diehards from their remaining strongholds is being noticed and appreciated by its beneficiaries far and wide.
Except for a few oddballs and media mavens with known sympathies for Islamists, Russia, or Syria, the international commentariat has been overwhelmingly critical of the emerging Trump-Erdogan axis and supportive of the Syrian Kurds.
The stinging broadsides have come not just from national-security hawks, but also many card-carrying liberals who had previously opposed US military entanglements abroad and forcefully backed President Barack Obama's decision in 2011 to withdraw all troops from Iraq and to sign a nuclear accord with Iran in 2015.
Admittedly, Trump's simultaneous decision to withdraw 5,000 US soldiers from Afghanistan in the face of a brutal offensive by the Taliban has compounded the concerns of Western politicians and moderate Arab regimes. But until the December 19 tweet went out, a consensus of this scale on a major foreign-policy issue was almost impossible to imagine in Washington or Brussels.
The unifying force of the backlash was further underscored by the resignations of a Trump appointee (Pentagon chief Jim Mattis) and an Obama-administration holdover (anti-ISIS coalition pointman Brett McGurk) in quick succession.
As for the argument that Trump was under pressure to keep an election promise, its validity has been challenged by none other than former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a known social conservative, who said: "I don't know of too many base voters who believe that the president, in response to a call from the Turkish president, should be capitulating in front of the Turks and allowing our allies to be slaughtered by Turks."
Barely a few days before Trump stirred up the Syria storm, Paul Davis, of the US consulting firm JANUS Think, had wondered aloud in a Rudaw comment piece why "there is greater concern for the Palestinians, who number around 8 million... than for the Kurds who number more than 50 million and have had a separate culture for millennia."
In hindsight, the reverberations from Washington's Syria volte-face have proved that neither the absence of protests in major cities in the West, nor the reluctance of the UN Security Council to hold emergency meetings is a reflection of Kurdish failure.
The expected turbulence in the coming days may or may not produce the kind of cross-border and cross-ideological unity that many Kurds have always dreamed of. But it has certainly created an opening for them to mobilize international public opinion in their favour, with the protection and preservation of the de-facto autonomous region in northern Syria as the immediate objective.
Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East.
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