Syria Safe Zones Will Undermine US Fight Against ISIS
30 July 2105 RPS Partnership
Neil Quilliam as Acting Head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme together with Jonathan Friedman, Middle East Expert, Centre for Turkey Studies have written an interesting article for Chatham House on how the Syria safe zones may undermine the US in its fight against ISIS.
In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US policy-makers scrambled to persuade Turkey to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein. The backing of Muslim-majority Turkey, in their view, would have pre-empted accusations in the region that the US was waging war against Islam.
Ankara eventually rejected the US’s entreaties, and Western troops partnered instead with Iraqi Kurds in the march on Baghdad. Despite Ankara’s protests, US-Kurdish cooperation formed the foundation for a Kurdish statelet in Iraq’s north, today the only part of that country with effective government.
Over a decade later, Turkey once against sees US-Kurdish cooperation on its border – this time in Syria – and fears the effect on its own restive Kurdish minority. Learning from the Iraq experience, Turkey has chosen instead to partner with the US. Its price for joining the coalition against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was the creation of safe zones along Syria’s northern border and a licence to target the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) across the border.
This may allow it to block the emergence of a Syrian Kurdish regional government mirroring its counterpart in Iraq, but it will alienate the West’s best allies on the ground in Syria, and distract the US from the war against ISIS.
'There is a risk that the alliance with Turkey will drag the US away from its narrow focus of degrading ISIS and towards regime chance.'
Ankara has long advocated creating a safe zone in northern Syria, seeing it as a panacea against a number of ills. The zone will reinvigorate the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebel groups preferred by the West, who will be able to launch attacks against Bashar al-Assad’s regime from the zone without fear of retaliatory bombing raids. Arguably, it will also be used to resettle some of Turkey’s two million-strong Syrian refugee population.
However, Turkey and the US are not creating no-fly zones, as such, but a number of ‘ink spot’ safe zones, which will be unlikely to accommodate a significant number of refugees. Most importantly, for Turkey, the creation of safe zones will permanently separate the Kurdish-controlled territories of Kobani and Jezira in the east from Afrin in the west, preventing the Kurds from establishing a self-governed crescent from eastern Iraq across Syria and towards the Mediterranean.
See the full article here http://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/syria-safe-zones-will-undermine-us-fight-against-isis?dm_i=1TY8,3KDAJ,J32WAZ,CSLXQ,1
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Photo: RPS in Syria. Young kids will always find something to play with