SOURCE:
“The delivery of $100 million is considered as
the latest move by Saudi Arabia in support of the partnership between the U.S.
and YPG. Using the fight against Daesh as a pretext, the U.S. has been
cooperating with the YPG in Syria and providing arms support to the group.
After Daesh was cleared from the region with the help of the U.S., the YPG
tightened its grip on Syrian soil taking advantage of the power vacuum in the war-torn country,”
Daily Sabah said referring to the Islamic State by one of its Arabic acronyms.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of
Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in
Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James
is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored
volume, Comparative
Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North
Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and
Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just
published China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
Syria’s Kurds:
The new frontline in confronting Iran andTurkey
The new frontline in confronting Iran andTurkey
By
US President Donald J.
Trump’s threat to devastate Turkey’s economy if Turkish troops attack
Syrian Kurds allied with the United States in the wake of the announced
withdrawal of American forces potentially serves his broader goal of letting
regional forces fight for common goals like countering Iranian influence in
Syria.
Mr. Trump’s threat coupled with a call on
Turkey to create a 26-kilometre buffer zone to protect Turkey from a perceived
Kurdish threat was designed to pre-empt a Turkish strike against the People’s
Protection Units (YPG) that Ankara asserts is part of the outlawed Kurdish
Workers Party (PKK), a Turkish group that has waged a low-intensity war in
predominantly Kurdish south-eastern Turkey for more than three decades.
Turkey has been marshalling forces for an
attack on the YPG since Mr. Trump’s announced withdrawal of US forces. It would
be the
third offensive against Syrian Kurds in recent years.
In a sign of strained relations with Saudi
Arabia, Turkish media with close ties to the government have been reporting
long before the October 2 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul that Saudi Arabia is funding the YPG. There is no
independent confirmation of the Turkish allegations.
Yeni Safak reported in 2017, days after the
Gulf crisis erupted pitting a Saudi-UAE-Egyptian alliance against Qatar, which
is supported by Turkey, that US, Saudi,
Emirati and Egyptian officials had met with the PKK as well as the Democratic
Union Party (PYD), which Turkey says is the Syrian political wing of the
PKK, to discuss the future of Syrian oil once the Islamic State had been
defeated.
Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu Agency
reported last May that Saudi
and YPG officials had met to discuss cooperation. Saudi Arabia promised to
pay Kurdish fighters that joined an Arab-backed force US$ 200 a month, Anadolu
said. Saudi Arabia allegedly sent aid to the YPG on trucks that travelled
through Iraq to enter Syria.
In August last year, Saudi
Arabia announced that it had transferred US$ 100 million to the United States
that was earmarked for agriculture, education, roadworks, rubble removal and
water service in areas of north-eastern Syria that are controlled by the
US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces of which the YPG is a significant part.
Saudi Arabia said the payment, announced on
the day that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in the kingdom, was intended
to fund stabilization of areas liberated from control by the Islamic State.
Saudi Arabia has refrained
from including the YPG and the PKK on its extensive list of terrorist
organizations even though then foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir described in
2017 the Turkish organization as a “terror group.”
This week’s Trump threat and his earlier
vow to stand by the Kurds despite the troop withdrawal gives Saudi Arabia and
other Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt political cover to
support the Kurds as a force against Iran’s presence in Syria.
It also allows the kingdom and the UAE to
attempt to thwart Turkish attempts to increase its regional influence. Saudi
Arabia, the UAE and Egypt have insisted
that Turkey must withdraw its troops from Qatar as one of the conditions
for the lifting of the 18-month old diplomatic and economic boycott of the Gulf
state.
The UAE, determined to squash any
expression of political Islam, has long led the autocratic Arab charge against
Turkey because of its opposition to the 2013 military coup in Egypt that toppled
Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and the country’s first and only
democratically elected president; Turkey’s close relations with Iran and Turkish
support for Qatar and Islamist forces in Libya.
Saudi Arabia the UAE and Egypt support
General Khalifa Haftar, who commands anti-Islamist forces in eastern Libya
while Turkey alongside Qatar and Sudan supports the Islamists.
Libyan
and Saudi
media reported that authorities had repeatedly intercepted Turkish arms
shipments destined for Islamists, including one this month and another last
month. Turkey has denied the allegations.
“Simply put, as Qatar has become the go-to
financier of the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical offshoot groups around
the globe, Turkey
has become their armorer,” said Turkey scholar Michael Rubin.
Ironically, the fact that various Arab
states, including the UAE and Bahrain, recently reopened their embassies in
Damascus with tacit Saudi approval after having supported forces aligned
against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for much of the civil war, like Mr.
Trump’s threat to devastate the Turkish economy, makes Gulf support for the
Kurds more feasible.
Seemingly left in the cold by the US
president’s announced withdrawal of American forces, the YPG has sought to
forge relations with the Assad regime. In response, Syria
has massed troops near the town of Manbij, expected to be the flashpoint of
a Turkish offensive.
Commenting on last year’s two-month long
Turkish campaign that removed Kurdish forces from the Syrian town of Afrin and Turkish
efforts since to stabilize the region, Gulf scholar Giorgio Cafiero noted
that “for
the UAE, Afrin represents a frontline in the struggle against Turkish
expansionism with respect to the Arab world.”
The same could be said from a Saudi and UAE
perspective for Manbij not only with regard to Turkey but also Iran’s presence
in Syria. Frontlines and tactics may be shifting, US and Gulf geopolitical
goals have not.
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