Not America's problem. We shouldn't be involved. Can you imagine if we had troops there trying to sort out that mess among the Turks, Russians, Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis, Iranians, and all the other terrorist players jockeying for power, territory and control of oil?
I don't need to
imagine because US forces never left Syria. They're there today in Eastern Syria trying to avoid getting into conflicts with Russian and other forces in the area.
Voice of America News June 03, 2020:
"Each day there are conversations between leaders here in the coalition and Russian leaders in Syria, where we share and exchange information on where our patrols will go," Caggins said, adding that there have been encounters between the two sides at times.
"Those encounters are normally resolved in a professional manner. And what we've seen in recent days was the United States escorting a Russian patrol out of an area that was not de-conflicted in eastern Syria," he told VOA.
The American official added that U.S.-led coalition "doesn't seek to have any escalations" with the Russians. "We certainly call on the Russians to not do anything to have an escalation or interfere with the SDF mission to defeat Daesh," he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS. https://www.voanews.com/extremism-watch/russia-eyes-military-expansion-northeast-syriaThe US is also currently protecting Syrian oil fields. These are frequent hotbeds of activity.
NPR March 26, 2020:
It's early morning in northeast Syria. It's sunny and chilly. Capt. Alex Quataert briefs his soldiers on the day's patrol.
"In the last 48 hours we've had two attacks on critical petroleum infrastructure," he says. The convoy will visit one of those sites today. "So we're going to have a show of presence there to deter any further attacks on these forces," Quataert says.
The mission for U.S. forces in Syria is now more complex — and possibly more dangerous. Though U.S. forces are doing a variety of things in Syria, 29-year-old Quataert says, "our primary mission is to secure the oil infrastructure for use of our partner force."
These soldiers had to quickly move east last fall when Turkish troops invaded cutting U.S. supply lines and threatening U.S. forces. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821379862/u-s-forces-in-syria-tackle-a-more-complex-and-possibly-dangerous-missionThe withdrawal of US troops in Syria, last October, was only from one region of Syria. The "Buffer Zone" along the Turkish / Syrian border.
Quoting from NPR article above again:
That all happened because President Trump essentially gave the green light for Turkey to invade, then tweeted that all U.S. troops would be leaving Syria. Soldiers here and in neighboring Iraq refer to that order as simply, "the Tweet."
But Trump reversed himself because military officials convinced him. The White House allowed hundreds of U.S. troops to stay and secure the oil fields for Kurdish forces.
U.S. forces in Syria work with a group of Kurdish and Arab fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF.
"They are the partner force that primarily defeated the physical caliphate — the actual ISIS-controlled area," says Quataert, a small, compact and serious West Point graduate from Rochester, N.Y. He says ISIS is not defeated yet.You see... What the US did last October was simply remove the US Special Forces teams, that were embedded with our SDF (Kurdish) allies, away from those forces along the Turkish border, leaving them to be killed or trying to escape. The only thing that had prevented Turkey from attacking the Kurds, before then, were those embedded US Special Forces. Turkey did not want a conflict with US soldiers and consequently the US. You might understand now why so many Republicans (and Democrats) were harshly critical of that policy.
The Kurds have a fascinating, and also sad, history that dates back centuries. You should read up on it. They've basically been screwed over for hundreds of years by everybody. In the last hundred years, at the end of World War I when the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) was defeated along with their German allies by US, French, and British forces, The Kurds were promised that Kurdistan (their home region) would be recognized as an independent nation. However, Turkey declared that they would keep fighting if the Kurds were given recognition as a nation; and they did keep fighting. So, the US, British, and French then renegotiated the armistice treaty (1923) and divided up the Middle East with new boundaries which created new nations, except for Kurdistan. Kurdistan was left partly in Turkey, partly in Syria, partly in Iraq, and partly in Iran. This left them as a minority in all of those countries instead of being a majority in their own country. They are a people with their own language, culture, history, territory; but no country.
The Turks have been trying to destroy the Kurds since the Armenian genocide shortly before WWI. In Turkey, until 1991, the use of the Kurdish language was illegal as was Kurdish music, clothing, or any other Kurdish cultural inheritance. They were not even allowed to be called Kurds, they were called Mountain Turks. The words Kurds, Kurdistan, or Kurdish were officially banned by the Turkish government. Education in Kurdish is now permitted but only in private institutions. From 1984 to 1999, the Turkish military destroyed houses and villages in the Turkish portion of Kurdistan. An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Turkey were virtually wiped off the map.
That's it. I'm done. I just wanted to give a little history in the hope that it might nudge some further interest of a few people to learn more.
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