The real tragedy is that Turks and Kurds are natural allies, like the British and the Irish.
The Americans should have set up talks to negotiate a permanent peace. Instead they stepped back, allowing control to be seized by those who don't want peace; unfortunately those include Erdogan.

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To all and sundry,

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There’s nothing wrong with Trump pulling back the American troops from Syria, per se. They were not destined to remain there indefinitely.

They were there on a specific mission : eradicate ISIS, as leader of the International Global Coalition (IGC) : 23 countries (including Australia) providing military support and 72 countries providing non-military support.

The major contingent of troops on the ground were supplied by the Kurds who engaged the enemy face to face and suffered the heaviest casualties (11,000 troops killed and many more injured).

The problem is that the American troops had not completely finished their mission when Erdogan decided to invade Syria to attack the Kurds, prompting Trump to withdraw his troops, plunging the IGC into disarray.

As a result, the Kurds, who had been a valiant and loyal ally to the Americans and the IGC, have been abandoned and betrayed, left to defend themselves, alone, against the second most powerful military force in NATO.

About 2 million Kurds live in north-eastern Syria, also known as Rojava, constituting the largest ethnic minority in Syria. The Turks have already forced 100,000 to flee the region, killing and injuring countless civilians.

Erdogan’s declared objective is to force the Kurds to evacuate a 32 km deep zone along the Turkish border to create a buffer between the Syrian and the Turkish Kurds he considers to be terrorists. He intends to replace them by the 3.5 million refugees he is being paid by the Europeans to prevent entering the European Union.

He has told the Europeans if they are not happy with that, he will open the flood gates and let them flee into Europe.

Also, as the Kurds rally to defend themselves, they abandon the prison camps housing the 100,000 captured ISIS fighters and their wives and children who are escaping and dispersing, en masse.

Like the mythical phoenix, ISIS is about to rise from its ashes and be born again.

Trump says it’s not his problem. It’s the problem of Europe and other nations that harbour fanatical Jihadist Islamists.

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Banjo,

A bit late: once the US invaded Iraq, it put in train a vast complexity of unanticipated outcomes. And anybody could have told them that the Middle East was an exceptionally complex political environment.

Like Bosnia, the Kurdish lands are in one of those religious and ethnic 'crunch zones': Bosnia is in that unhappy zone between Orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity and Islam. The Kurds have been in those lands for perhaps many thousands of years, long before Turks arrived in Turkey and Persians in Persia from central Asia, and long, long before the Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula. A thousand years ago, even central and perhaps parts of southern Iraq were Kurdish. Saladin (Salah-ud-Din) was a Kurd, born in Tikrit.

So they're nobody's particular friend. Yet it's their country, for more than thirty million Kurds. If Kurdistan was a single country, it would have more people than Syria or Iraq. Or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. The Kurds have far more gender equality than any of those neighbours. In fact, this may be one reason why it is disliked by neighbouring governments.

So who are the allies of the US in the Middle East now ? Saudi Arabia. And only because of its oil. As the US moves to renewables as the next truly-ruly Big Thing in capitalism, admittedly in many decades yet, they would obviously abandon the Saudis just as they've gutlessly abandoned the Kurds. No honour among thieves.

Joe

So what's going to happen from now on ?

* ISIS will re-group and re-form its caliphate in south-west Syria and western Iraq; this time without the Kurds playing an active role to defeat them;

* Iran will move in to replace the US, and push their forces right up to the Israeli border; they will leave ISIS alone for the time being;

* Iran may (de facto) absorb southern Iraq and deploy bases and troops along the Saudi border; that should keep the US busy protecting its oil interests; at least until they can go CSG and renewables, then the Saudis are on their own. Couldn't happen to nicer people;

* Turkey won't pull back yet, and maybe not at all: there will be a deal between Iran, Russia, Syria's Assad and the Turks to screw the Kurds, our one-time and one-and-only faithful ally in the Middle East;

* The US will pretend that they are extremely busy with other issues and look the other way. Gutless wonders.

And all Trump had to do was leave a token force in the area, a thousand troops at what ? A few million dollars a day ? Peanuts.

So contemptible.

Joe

Turkish attack on Kurdish-held town allows 950 ISIS detainees to escape

http://www.axios.com/isis-detainees-northern-syria-turkey-kurdish-ec58db13-93c0-4c9c-8158-6d4b8dbb6e9c.html