Rough Transcript
Drew Griffin
Welcome to the ProvCast, regular podcast at Providence, the journal of Christianity and global affairs. I’m managing editor Drew Griffin. The month of October has been a tumultuous month in the northeast of Syria and in the Near East as the region responds to the sudden US decision to withdraw forces from Syria, which have been supporting and buttressing Kurdish forces in the region as they fought against ISIS and attempted to secure for themselves some sort of sub-national regional presence. The fallout has been quick and the consequences have been dire. We’ve seen the invasion of Syria by Turkey. We’ve seen the implementation of sanctions by the US against Turkey. Recently, the brokered ceasefire by the United States between Turkey and the Kurds, much of this chaos needs to be explained, and so to equip us to understand what is going on, happy to welcome Faysal Itani. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He’s been a guest here on the ProvCast before, so Faysal, welcome.
Faysal Itani
Thank you. Thank you, Drew.
Drew Griffin
So, this is a rapidly changing situation, and, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday two weeks after the tweet by President Trump announcing, kind of suddenly, it seems, without much notice to either his administration, to the allies, or to the region that the US would be withdrawing. And every single day, there has been new developments, and it’s almost hard to put your finger on the situation, to try and, you know, hold it down long enough to explain what exactly is kind of going on. But, I thought it would be helpful, and I wanted to just lean on your expertise to maybe… Let’s start by giving us a picture beyond what I painted kind of in the introduction as to where we are at this point in this conflict.
Faysal Itani
At this very minute, the two main belligerents in this conflict are the Turkish military and a Kurdish, or largely Kurdish militia, called the YPG. We can get into the background of these respective actors. It’s complicated. At the minute, what’s supposed to be going on now is a ceasefire between the Turkish and Kurdish forces brokered by the White House yesterday, and that ceasefire is supposed to last for five days, after which Turkey is supposed to be granted essentially a safe zone with a 20 mile deep buffer along the Syrian-Turkish border that would supposedly address its security concerns on the ground. And the Kurdish forces are supposed to pull back, essentially, south-southward of Syria. Now, Turkey accepted this yesterday, because it essentially gives Turkey what it wants under a institutionalized US cover, but the Kurdish forces said yesterday, as soon as yesterday, that they read it actually completely differently, and that they would not be withdrawing from these areas. So, not surprisingly, the new ceasefire broke down today, and I guess we’re back to square one.
Drew Griffin
Right. So, help us maybe understand if you can some of the, you know, particulars of these actors, because we… I think it’s probably a surprise, and I think maybe even you and I have talked about this in previous podcasts, and probably a lot of Americans didn’t even know we had troops in Syria until last year when President Trump at the end of the year said, oh, by the way, we have troops in Syria and we’re going to withdraw them and take them out because we’ve defeated ISIS. And, you know, we have been partnered with the Kurds. They have been kind of our allies. And so, there has been this massive cry on the part of the international community, the diplomatic community, even kind of people within State and within official apparatus. Congress has passed a unanimous resolution condemning President Trump’s action to withdraw and kind of in banning the Kurds. But it might be helpful to kind of even just talk about, when we talk about the Kurds, what exactly are we talking about, because this isn’t necessarily a monolithic group. We’re talking about 35 million people in four different Middle Eastern, Near Eastern countries of Turkey and Iran and Iraq and Syria. And so, it’s help… Maybe describe when we’re talking about the Kurds, the Kurds that are being abandoned, the Kurds that are viewed by Turkey as a terrorist organization or a regional threat, like, help us maybe assess if you can, when we’re talking about the Kurds exactly who we’re talking about.
Faysal Itani
Yeah. No, we’re talking about something quite specific, actually. The heart of this issue is that Turkey, which is a kind of very nationalist republic—is strongly Turkish in its identity—has a substantial Kurdish majority living in its territory, over a big chunk of its territory, actually, and from within that Kurdish population, there is a militant group called the PKK. It’s kind of this leftist group that started operating militarily against the state and […] 1980s, that’s been fighting an insurgency with Turkey on and off. Since then, that insurgency and counterinsurgency has killed tens of thousands of people. So, there is a historical backdrop to this. The Kurds inside Syria—which are about 10 percent of the population—they are now have come under the control of a group called the PYD. And the PYD is essentially the PKK’s affiliate in Syria. So, the PKK’s branch in Syria, and that’s how Turkey sees it. Turkey sees that this group that controls that territory in Syria is an offshoot of the same group they’ve been fighting a counterinsurgency with for the past four decades. And so, this really starts with the emergence of the ISIS problem in the context of the Syrian civil war in northern Syria.
In about years 2013, 2014, we did not have any specific plans that we were going to partner with the PYD to fight the ISIS forces, but what ended up happening was there was a town in northern Syria called Kobanî, Turkish—Kurdish, rather, town, sorry—that came under siege by ISIS and the Kurdish forces there put up quite a fight. And essentially, we came in to help them against ISIS at that point, and we decided that a) they were good fighters—they were well organized, they were disciplined—and b)—and this was very important and it sometimes gets lost in the debate—the PYD, which is the political party that controls these forces who are called the YPG—I don’t want to get lost in acronym soup, but I’m just kind of making my caveats—the PYD did not… was not in conflict with the Syrian regime at the time, and we needed a local partner. We obviously needed a local partner because we didn’t want to do all the fighting ourselves on the ground for obvious political, strategic reasons. We needed a partner that would not drag us into the broader Syria civil war if we put our weight behind them. And, all the forces on the ground at the time that we’re fighting ISIS, whether it’s the Syrian regime or Hezbollah or the Syrian rebel groups that were fighting ISIS and the regime, everybody in one way or another was implicated in this fight, which we did not want to get implicated in. So, almost by default and by elimination, it fell on the Kurds. And now, with the years that followed in the anti-ISIS fight, of course, relationships were built up at the military-to-military level, and, you know, quite a lot of sympathy was built for the Kurdish forces here in the United States as well, so things happen that were built on top of something that wasn’t exactly planned that way. And, in the process, the United States ended up, if you like, midwifing, or incubating, a statelet controlled by the PYD on Turkey’s borders under a US security umbrella. This is essentially what this is all about.
Drew Griffin
And so, this is kind of sub-national states, this kind of, like you said, non, you know sub-state, whatever you want to call it, that we were kind of giving an umbrella to, is there… Turkey views that as a threat, and Syria likely also has, you know, the Assad regime looks at that with a certain amount of skepticism as well, right? I mean, there—it seems like there, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s Syria, whether it’s Turkey, the desire for control over these regions and the elimination of kind of actors over which you don’t have control seem to be a major focus, correct?
Faysal Itani
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, for the Turks—on the Turks’ part, they see the Syrian Kurdish forces, the PYD, as essentially literally just an extension of the guys they’ve been fighting in Turkey. And when you talk to Turks about the Kurdish forces in Syria, they call them PKK, which is the name of that Kurdish-based Marxist insurgency that they’ve been fighting for so long. So, for them, there’s no difference. It’s just that in Syria, they happen to have freedom of maneuver and an American umbrella or cover, which is a worst nightmare situation for the Turks. Now, as far as the regime is concerned, the regime has a completely zero-sum view of Syria and Syrian politics. For the regime, all of Syria belongs to the regime, and anybody who works with outsiders to hand it off is a traitor, basically. And, even if they lose a bit of it here and there, eventually, the long term goal is that it’s going to come back under regime control. So, yeah, that’s the regime’s point of view. And, you know, there are other actors too. It gets more complicated, but those are the basic core actors on the ground.
Drew Griffin
So, there seems to be a pattern in kind of current US foreign policy, and it’s a baffling pattern to me because it seems to, you know, continually cause more problems than it stops. It’s this kind of isolated view, a very kind of particular atomistic view of particular problems in the Middle East and the world in general. So, Trump will look at a situation and say, well, if, you know, Turkey is going to do what they’re going to do, let’s just take out our troops. And yet, there are always these ancillary effects, that there are always a domino effect that kind of always sets up because the international community—it’s a web of interests, and it’s a web of problems and opportunities for different actors. And so, if you move something on this side over here, if you remove troops, it’s not just affecting the Kurds, right? It’s not just affecting what Turkey does, or what Assad does, but there are all of these kind of ancillary things that happen afterwards. And so I want to kind of go through some of those, maybe leading with just… Let’s look at minority groups in this kind of region, in this northeast Syrian region. So, ISIS, as it’s spreading from Iraq across kind of the Levant into Syria, it’s, you know, raiding towns and villages. It’s conducting a number of pernicious activities of murder and rape, and you have stories of, you know, sexual slavery and villages being razed to the ground. They’re Christian villages, they’re Yazidi villages. Talk about… And now that the US is absent, now that there is an increase in violence, you have a number of NGOs, non-governmental organizations and humanitarian organizations withdrawing, you know, to protect their own forces, which leaves, you know, all of the humanitarian needs kind of going unanswered. So, can you shed a little light for us on kind of the danger that now may be faced by minority groups that are kind of stuck in the middle in the midst of this regional fight?
Faysal Itani
Yeah, of course, and look, this is a really difficult one to play out because there are so many factors going on on the ground as we speak, and we don’t know how the other main actors are going to react to our withdrawal. But, definitely, you know, the very fact that ISIS was there and took control of so much land, and was able to exert so much influence and control, and was able to do so much damage to the non-Sunni Muslim minorities inside these territories, that’s the lowest cause for concern. I think the rationale… If you’re the sort of person who supports a US disengagement from this part of… this part of Syria, this part of the world, the rationale behind that is, well, you know, let those other actors who also hate ISIS,take care of this problem. So, the assumption being the Syrian regime doesn’t like ISIS either. The Kurds are still there and don’t like ISIS. Russia hates ISIS. Iran, hates ISIS. So, if you listen to what Donald Trump says, that’s what he’s saying, right: these guys will take care of the ISIS problem. Which raises the question of, are they capable of doing that? Do they have the willpower? Do they have the capability? There’s a troubling track record on this because throughout most of the Syrian conflicts since 2011, the Syrian regime, for example, and Russia and Iran didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the ISIS problem. They seemed content to let ISIS take a big chunk of Syrian territory. But, that was because they were fighting a more proximate threat, which was for them the mainstream Syrian opposition. That was the ultimately the real problem because those are the guys who might eventually attract international support. They have a broader social base, etc., so we’ll leave ISIS alone. Question comes up for me is, okay, now they take control of these territories since the Kurds seem to be handing them… handing the regime much of this land now voluntarily, will they actually serve as an effective counterterrorism force? I think they’re not going to be as effective as the US-Kurdish partnerships, frankly. However, I think there’s also something to be said for, what is in the long term interest of these minority groups? So, the Kurds, for example, were put into this position where they were convinced by the United States that there was a long-term strategic partnership between America and the Kurds, and that, therefore, the Kurds could pursue their political ambitions with little regard to the provocative nature and what their adversaries would essentially do. So, I’m not sure also it was wise to put the Kurds in a position where eventually they’re going to be confronted by Turkey, which would bring up the question of what we were going to do about it, and therefore would raise the question of what happens to them as a minority in this context. So, that’s also dangerous. There’s many angles to it. It’s not just the ISIS angle.
Drew Griffin
Yes. Let’s, if we can, though, head into the ISIS angle a little bit. I mean, Trump has, you know, declared multiple times that 100 percent of ISIS has been defeated. This was kind of the initial impetus behind his original withdrawal request that he issued last year at the end of the year, you know, saying we’ve defeated ISIS; why are we even there anymore? You know, they’ve been eliminated. And yet, the pushback on the part of the international community and on the part of his own administration was, well, yes, geographically, they are no longer in control of villages or towns or any kind of territory, but they’re still present. There’s a nascent kind of presence of ISIS there that could very well still, you know, reignite. Much of that kind of presence has been checked by the Kurdish autonomy in this region. They have manned detention camps that have ISIS fighters in them. They have also refugee camps that have ISIS families and women and children, and people who are associated with ISIS that have been—all of which have been—kind of policed by Kurdish forces. Now that the Kurdish forces are fighting, they’re withdrawing. There are reports from, you know, the international community that the—and the press—that ISIS fighters have been able to break out [from] these camps. Some number of thousands have been repatriated, I guess, into the ether there. That could also represent a threat. So, I mean, what is kind of the prospect here of an ISIS resurgence? If everyone is, you know, if the eye is off the ball, so to speak?
Faysal Itani
Oh, I think it’s, I think in… You know, at some point or another, these things are going to find a stable end state, if you will, some sort of balance of power, but that is a messy and long process, and I think that that process definitely opens up an opportunity for ISIS to increase its operations, increase its reach. And now he said that, I don’t think the President really believes that they’re defeated in that sense. I don’t think anyone will believe that. I think the President simply thinks it’s somebody else’s problem to manage. I don’t think he thinks the deal is done. They’re not defeated. They’ve still been carrying out operations. They’ve come back from situations as bad as this in Iraq before. We saw that time and time again, whether it was during the US occupation, or in the years that followed the US withdrawal. They’re very resilient; they’re very smart. And they’re still well resourced. They still have experienced fighters in their cavalries, and I completely agree with you about the prisoners. I mean, maybe a little less so about the families, but especially the hardened fighters themselves. ISIS in 2013, in 2012, launched a campaign in Iraq that was explicitly about breaking out—breaking fighters out of prisons, and replenishing basically their ranks with these experienced, hardened fighters. They will try to do this in Syria. I have no doubt because it was very effective the last time they did it in Iraq. And that is definitely a concern. And let’s see, you know, depends on who ends up controlling these prisons. I expect many of these are going to come under regime control, and I have no idea how the Syrian regime will handle ISIS prisoners, if they’ll just, you know, be sentenced to a mass execution or will they be kept in these camps? I have no idea. It’s a big unknown. And yeah, it’s very disturbing, and I think one of the reasons why the United States is trying to broker as ceasefire in—or at least one of the reasons it should be trying to broker a ceasefire—in northern Syria.
Drew Griffin
So, one of the conundrums of international affairs and foreign policy is, you know, the tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good, right? I mean, there is always a lot of criticism on the part of people outside of US government, outside of the kind of foreign policy establishment, that say, you know, well, this is a less than ideal situation. You know, Trump should not have done this. Now, the region is in chaos, not as if the region was overly stable before this, but there is… You know, we are oftentimes fighting over the lesser goods, right, as opposed to kind of an ultimate good. I mean, ultimate good is like everybody gets along, everybody plays together, there’s some measure of kind of peace, and everyone leaves one another alone, you know, and ISIS gives up its its ghost and starts farming or something, right? I mean, there are always these ideals that are set out there. So, we’re in an imperfect system. We’re playing with imperfect actors. And so, we’re often choosing between the lesser of two evils. And so, what is puzzling to me and it may be puzzling to a lot of people, and maybe you can shed some light on it is that at what point are we letting go of our own interests, and, you know, putting our own interests, subordinating those interests, to the interests of, let’s say, Turkey or Syria, that there is a… If you look at what happened on 9/11, the lesson from that, hopefully, is that what’s happening thousands of miles away in remote, little mountaintops and villages is very much still related to us, even if we would not like to think it so, that someone in one of these caves can plot and plan an operation to kill thousands of Americans. And so, it is in our interest to keep an eye on this region and to be involved. And so, I mean, how do you see kind of the interests of these various actors in the region, whether it’s Turkey or Syria or the United States, kind of playing out against one another? Is the United States effectively looking out for its interests if it just says, oh, you guys all just fight it out and this has nothing to do with us, especially when that leaves an opening for Russia? Help, maybe, assess how our actions are impacting the various interests in the region.
Faysal Itani
Yeah, this is the key question and the most complicated one. And I sympathize with anybody trying to find a kind of concrete policy solution to the crisis in Syria, including the ISIS and the Kurdish issues. For me, there were always… I told you everything you’re […] And of course, it’s important what happens over there, whether it’s in a cave or a city, because it affects us, and it affects our allies. But for me, there were always two kind of gaping flaws in this arrangement. The first one was that the President very clearly ran on a platform, but I think he was sincere about, that we needed to do as little of this stuff as possible. You know, America first, etc., let others shoulder the burden. And that’s just a given, you know, it’s not… I don’t think he should have run on that platform, and I don’t agree with him about everything, but that’s who he is, right? That’s the president. And that’s the direction—therefore, that is the direction that he wants to take the country in, and the bureaucracy and national security establishment needs to take that into account. Because you know, that’s the president you have until you have a different one, and that’s important.
The second part for me, which is maybe even more unsolvable, and has nothing to do with President Donald Trump, is the fact that… is frankly Turkey. When Turkey is… A Turkey is a NATO ally. But, even forget about being a NATO ally; Turkey is a very, very powerful, basically regional juggernaut of a country, and it has been fighting this existential war with these guys for the past 40 years. It was never realistic that they were going to sit back and let us build whatever it is we were doing in Syria with the Kurds after ISIS sort of got subdued, and things started to calm down a little in the broader Syrian civil war. I didn’t think they would ever tolerate it. I thought at some point that there would be a challenge. and I thought that when that challenge happened, then suddenly your kind of imperfect, yet okay situation that you’re talking about becomes a crisis. How do we resolve that crisis? It comes down at the end of the day, like most conflicts, who cares more about the issue? Right? Do we care more about the PYD in Syria than Turkey cares about Syria writ large and its own insurgency? Because eventually we’re going to get bored and move on to the next thing and they’re still going to be there. And that’s a complete, a core national security interest for them. Imagine for us who are—I’m not saying this is the same thing—but through our eyes, imagine if an ally of ours—let’s say Great Britain—were to ally with al-Qaeda in Mexico and set up a state there. That’s how they see it. That’s exactly how they see it. They don’t see it any differently. So, that made it completely for me an unsustainable situation that would either result in us getting out of there, or result in a… essentially a war with Turkey over the PYD, which, although some people from a kind of ideological perspective might think that sound, I think that’s a bad idea for 100 reasons. So, it was not… it was not very well planned. And, to be fair, I don’t think that it is pinned—can be pinned on this current administration. I think that goes… eventually falls on President Barack Obama and his administration because this was their idea. And this is the logical outcome of that idea. So, yes, I think it’s not… I think it’s worse than imperfect. I think it’s a bad plan, even though I understand why it happened, to begin with, that way. Everybody else is still going to be there when we get out of the area. Russia is still going to be there. Turkey, Iran—they’re deeply invested actors. I think if you jump into a pool where there are many, many deeply invested actors, you need to be very clear how much you care and how willing you are to go in further and further your aims. And it turns out, we’re not that willing about this particular thing. That does not mean that it has to happen in the crazy, chaotic, ridiculous way it played out. So, that’s a different matter altogether.
Drew Griffin
Right. So, there is a… That’s always, though, I think the kind of the fight with US foreign policy, right, is it’s making the case of whether or not we should or should not be involved somewhere, like I mean, it’s a case that always has to be made, unless you’re like Trump, and you say, well, it doesn’t really matter. But, I mean, it’s hard for me to see, like, we’re not pushing for perfection, and I get that our involvement with the Kurds, you know, probably would have at some point led to some sort of a turning point. But, it still seems to me to be a little bit ham-fisted, a little bit kind of chaotic, and when other actors in the region, specifically Russia, now rush in to—no pun intended—rush in to, you know, kind of have regional dominance, I mean, let’s talk a little bit maybe if we can about Russia as we kind of move to a close, where is Russia’s part in this? I mean, as the United States has kind of just said, hey, you guys fight it out, I mean, that’s all fine and well, but now we have an actor that has, you know, diametrically opposed values and ends in mind to our own in Russia that’s coming along and brokering agreements between Syria and the Kurds, that is now occupying formerly held US bases. There are social media videos of them walking around saying, look, we’re now in this… We’re now holding what the US once had. So, it seems to me that there’s still an argument to be made that, and—this is a quote that I love from General Mattis, you know, former Secretary of Defense who actually resigned mostly over President Trump’s initial decision to announce withdraw from Syria last year—he says this: the saying in the military is, you know, that the enemy gets a vote, right?
Faysal Itani
Yes.
Drew Griffin
That you may not want to do this. It may be hard. It may be difficult. It may be complicated. But, the enemy is also present. The enemy has a vote in this, and you may want to just pick up your toys and go home, but if they are still there, if they are still active, if they are still antagonistic to our interests in the region and to our values globally, we have to take that into account. And we neglect all of that to our peril. So, look into the region and look at Russia a little bit and help us maybe understand where Russia’s interests are in this and maybe the danger that our withdrawl poses with the increase in Russian presence there.
Faysal Itani
Yeah, certainly […] All of this stuff has implications for our allies, allies and rivals. The Russians have some specific and some much broader interests in Syria. The specific interests they had, that they’ve always had, is basically to protect their ally, the Syrian regime, who they’ve been allied with for decades, and to make sure that that regime reasserts its control over all of Syrian territory. That’s always been the case. That remains the number one Russian objective in Syria. The other objective is basically to humiliate us and decrease our own influence in the country. At the beginning, this took the form largely of making sure that the Syrian insurgency failed, and that the Syrian opposition failed to extract political concessions from the Syrian regime. Russia was a big part of that, obviously, with the direct military intervention in Syria on the regime side, so that was mission accomplished for them. And, now, because the Kurdish forces cannot stand up to Turkey—essentially, a Turkish invasion—what they’ve preferred to do is reach an agreement with the regime to essentially hand over most of the territory they gained control of throughout the last few years in partnership with us. And that means that the regime control geographically in the country expands, and for Russia, again, that’s a step in the right direction. It’s also good for the Russians for the United States to be perceived as kind of unreliable and feckless, and that to its allies and things of that sort. These are all Russian games. So yeah, no, definitely Russia is one of the winner in here, no doubt about it.
Drew Griffin
Well, it’s a complicated situation that’s quickly changing, and so we appreciate your insight. I appreciate your insight, and we will continue to monitor the situation. We’ve been talking to Faysal Itani, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and discussing Syria and the Kurds and the US withdrawal from the region. Faysal, thank you for your expertise and your time.
Faysal Itani
Thank you, Drew.
