Escape from Syria

(To Andrea Gaspardo)
27/12/18

The announcement came unexpectedly and caught everyone by surprise. The December 19, through a video attached to one of its daily "tweets", the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, announced that the United States has defeated ISIS and that within a time frame of 60-100 days all American troops will be withdrawn from Syria (and Iraq). In addition, once the withdrawal is complete, air sorties will also be completed as part of the "Inherent Resolve" operation, active by 15 on June 2014, which in 4 and a half years has brought the US Air Force and its international partners to Complete 24.000 airstrikes, for a total of 170.000 sorties that have caused the ISIS military forces over 80.000 leaks and the destruction of more than 32.000 terrorist targets. However, the US and international military engagement in the skies and on the ground in the struggle to defeat ISIS has resulted in a political price that, in the long run, the United States has not been able to accept: the deterioration of relations between Turkey and NATO.

Indeed, the tightening of political-diplomatic-military relations between Turkey on the one hand and the United States, Israel, NATO and the West in general on the other, can be traced back to the 2002, the year of the ascent to power of the AKP party in Turkey. This "break" then did not happen in an instantaneous and traumatic manner as in the case of the Iranian revolution, but it was a progressive but no less unstoppable event.

The spark that marked the fateful "point of no return" was the US and Western military intervention against ISIS in the context of the "Great Middle Eastern War" that pushed the United States and its western partners to establish a a de facto alliance with the Kurds of Syria, who had long been in Ankara's sights because they considered nothing more than a local branch of the PKK, the Workers' Party of Kurdistan, with which Ankara is at war for exactly 40 years.

Unfortunately, the political leadership and the "deep state" of America, both during the Obama presidency and the Trump one, have constantly failed to assess the degree of animosity, when not a real "phobia" that the whole "country system Turkey "(From the high points of politics to the common man on the street) has always nourished towards the Kurds and their autonomous and independentist demands. That is why it was not difficult for the Turkish President Erdogan to gather within the country the necessary consensus to launch two military operations within the borders of Syria (the operation "Shield of the Euphrates", between 24 2016 August and the 29 March of the 2017, and the operation "Olive Branch", between the 20 January and the 24 March 2018) that, although quite expensive in economic and human terms, have allowed the Turkish armed forces to take control of a vast "Security zone" in the northern part of Syria, expelling hundreds of thousands of Kurds residing there and completely eradicating the military structures of local YPG (Kurdish self-defense forces).

The success of the military operations "Shield of Euphrates" and "Ramoscello d'Ulivo" has given the United States a very uncomfortable situation, having to choose between a powerful and unreliable ally like Turkey, whose "benevolence" depends on the functioning of the whole device of bases and infrastructures that guarantee the viability of American and Western intervention in the Middle East, and a loyal but absolutely irrelevant geostrategic highest as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, acronym-screen under which the political formations hide) and soldiers of the Kurds of Syria).

The unsustainable tactical-strategic situation of the SDFs had already been presented in all its clarity in the first half of the 2018, when the Kurds had failed in the strategic objective of creating a single territorial corridor that would unite the whole of northern Syria, from the province of al-Hasakah to the Mediterranean coast, isolating Turkey from the rest of the Syrian territory and thus acquiring a position which can not be circumvented in a negotiable position. Instead, despite the anti-ISIS military operations backed by the United States and the international coalition, they have allowed the SDF to defeat most of the Islamic State's device beyond the Euphrates River and go deep into the territory of the so-called al-Jazira ( the desert area to the right of the Euphrates and between Syria and Iraq), from a geostrategic point of view, the territorial conquests obtained at a hard price by the SDF are absolutely indefensible.

Although the Rojava area (as the whole territory is defined in the hands of the SDF) now includes over 27% of the Syrian territory and guarantees to the Kurds the control of the main areas of agricultural production (al-Hasakah province), water resources ( high river Euphrates with relative dams) and a good part of the oil, as well as a not inconsiderable percentage of the Syrian population, the impossibility of having access to the markets and international credit and the fact of confining with hostile powers absolutely not inclined to recognize this situation of "de facto secession" and ready to block all road and river arteries from and to Rojava at all times, makes the Kurds unable to form a stable, secure state entity. can "march alone" without the constant presence of the American armed forces and their allies.

The Turks have long eaten the leaf and also know that, once the economic weapon has been exhausted (a period of turbulence in the financial markets in the pre-election period and a summer speculative attack against the Turkish lira), the United States has no other weapons of pressure in the comparisons with them (on the other hand, to think that a temporary financial storm was enough to overthrow the government of a man who survived a coup like the 2016 coup, demonstrates a totally unjustified certainty and imbecility!). In the light of the renewed Turkish pressures, the internal problems caused by the "mid-term" elections are in difficulty, and probably aware that a new global economic crisis is coming, threatening to preclude any possibility of re-election , Trump crashed opting for the "plan B" that many American presidents before him have casually implemented from Vietnam to Iraq, through the operation "Eagle's Claw" (hostage crisis in Iran) and Somalia: escape!

And whether it is a real "save those who can" proves it is the earthquake to the political-military policies within the American administration (resignation of the Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the special envoy for Syria Brett McGurk) , both the strals coming from the allies (in the Middle East, but also elsewhere) literally "terrorized" by the fact that all the alliances painstakingly concluded with the United States of America over the course of several decades now turn out to be nothing more than "pieces of paper "Easily torn by a tycoon obsessed only by the need to" survive politically "to the war that the" deep state "has moved and absolutely not willing to be manipulated in the political agenda by centers of military and economic-financial power not fully aligned with he and not able to impact positively and immediately in his search for consent. In other words: if the upper echelons of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and their Israeli friends really thought that Trump would accept the "historical necessity" to remain mired indefinitely in Syria just to undermine the plans of the Russians and Iranians sacrificing at the same time economic resources and precious percentage points of electoral consent in view of the presidential elections of 2020, have definitely made a hole in the water!

The eternal defeats of this dramatic "game of poker" are the Kurds who, for the umpteenth time, have seen manipulating their autonomist and independentist instances by some great powers that have previously diverted their political projects to their own use and consumption and now their task is exhausted, they are cruelly abandoning them to their destiny.

(photo: US Army / US Air Force / Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri / US DoD)