In Syria, the US has a Turkey problem
Daniel DePetris
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Although Syria may technically be a state, it’s not exactly sovereign. And although President Bashar Assad has managed to pummel, starve, isolate, and gas his opponents into submission with the vital assistance of Russia and Iran, he still doesn’t have total control of his country. Thirteen years after its civil war began, Syria remains a petri dish of foreign entanglement.
Israel conducts airstrikes against Iranian military facilities and weapons shipments destined for Hezbollah; the United States retains 900 troops in the northeast; Russian aircraft occasionally bomb jihadist-linked factions in the northwest; Jordan has started hitting drug plants near the Jordanian-Syrian border; and Turkey may have as many as 10,000 troops in Syria.
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Sometimes, those foreign forces clash, even if they happen to be treaty allies.
On Thursday, the U.S. decided to use an F-16 fighter aircraft to shoot down an armed Turkish drone as it was getting dangerously close to U.S. positions in Syria’s northeast. The threat was deemed high enough for U.S. troops to take to their bunkers. The shoot-down wasn’t the Pentagon’s first choice. According to U.S. defense officials, the U.S. tried to get in touch with its Turkish military counterparts 12 times, but the drone was still operating in the restricted zone. The entire saga was a “regrettable incident,” Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder told reporters the morning after the engagement. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. C.Q. Brown, quickly called their respective Turkish colleagues to smooth over any ruffled feathers.
No harm, no foul. Right?
Well, U.S. and Turkish defense officials certainly hope so. Ideally, the two sides would learn from this single incident and adapt their plans and procedures accordingly. Turkey and the U.S. are, after all, NATO allies, and to say that two allies shooting at one another’s military assets is a bit awkward would be the understatement of the century.
But the fact is that this isn’t the first time U.S. and Turkish forces have engaged each other. On Oct. 11, 2019, Turkish troops unleashed artillery fire on U.S. positions near Kobane, the small town on the Turkish-Syrian border that was made infamous in 2014 after Kurdish fighters held off an ISIS assault. The Pentagon at the time said that Turkey understood full well that U.S. forces were operating in that particular area, and some U.S. officials even suspected the Turkish action was a deliberate attempt to push U.S. troops out of the vicinity. The Turks were engaged in a ground offensive against Kurdish forces at the time of the strike.
In April of this year, Washington and Ankara got into another spat. While it wasn’t reported widely by the U.S. press at the time, U.S. military officials confirmed that Turkey tried to kill Mazloum Kobane, the commander of the U.S.-partnered Syrian Democratic Forces, in a drone strike as his convoy was moving in Iraqi Kurdistan. Three Americans were apparently in the convoy at the time of the attack. Fortunately, the strike failed to do its job.
Since the U.S. destroyed the Turkish drone, Washington and Ankara have done their best to sweep the incident under the rug. The U.S. and Turkey are claiming that their communication links and deconfliction protocols in Syria have been improved. None of us will know if this is truly accurate until the two countries find themselves in another situation where a clash is possible, if not imminent.
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Regrettably, the probability of another mishap is high, and it will remain high as long as U.S. forces are stationed in Syria. Most of the U.S. presence in Syria is based in the very same Kurdish-dominated northeast Turkey has been hitting with dozens of airstrikes in retaliation for a Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, terrorist attack at the Turkish Interior Ministry. Turkish warplanes are targeting the very same Kurdish fighters the U.S. has relied on over the last decade to fight the Islamic State. This isn’t as surprising as it may sound: The U.S. and Turkey have vastly different definitions of what a terrorist consists of, with the Turks viewing all armed Kurdish factions in Syria as extensions of the PKK and thus legitimate targets and the U.S. distinguishing between the PKK in Turkey and Kurdish fighters in Syria.
At some point, U.S. officials sitting in the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon need to ask a basic question: Is the risk of stumbling into a war with a greater power, and a treaty ally no less, worth whatever counterterrorism benefits a ground presence in Syria provides the U.S.? The answer should be self-evident at this point: No.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.