Leaders in Syrian Kurdistan asked the United States this week to provide protective troops and become more involved in keeping the peace as they face an ongoing campaign by Turkish proxy forces to eradicate them.
One senior leader of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), which represents Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), suggested American troops, with French help, could “secure the entire border” between Turkey and Syria.
The top commander of the U.S.-allied, Kurdish-run Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Gen. Mazloum Abdi, also said in an interview on Thursday that American forces could be the “key factor of stabilization” in northern Syria.
Syria endured a decade-long period of civil war under ousted dictator Bashar Assad that began in 2011 and, by late 2024, had reached a point of apparent stagnation. The al-Qaeda offshoot jihadist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) staged a surprise attack on Aleppo in late November, shocking the Assad regime and resulted in a string of victories as a result of the collapse of the Syrian military. By early December, HTS reached the outskirts of Damascus; Assad himself is believed to have fled the country between December 7 and 8.
At the same time that HTS solidified control and became the de facto government of Syria, the Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a campaign to destroy the SDF called “Operation Dawn of Freedom.” The SNA is a militia formerly known as the “Free Syrian Army” that is now largely considered a proxy force for the Turkish government. The SDF is a Kurdish-led coalition with close ties to the United States that played a major role in the dismantling of the Islamic State “caliphate” headquartered in Syria in 2017.
The Turkish government considers the Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ), the heart of the SDF, terrorist organizations indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PPK), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The disagreement over cooperating with the Syrian Kurds has caused a rift that could potentially pit Turkey and America, NATO allies, against each other.
HTS maintains non-aggressive relations with both Turkey and the Syrian Kurds. HTS officials have invited the SDF to integrate into the reconstructed Syrian Armed Forces but only on the condition that they do not seek the establishment of a sovereign Kurdistan carved out of Syrian territory. HTS has also sought support from Turkey and the Islamist government of strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for the world to lift terror sanctions on the militia now that they are in control of the Syrian government.
DAANES foreign relations co-chair Elham Ahmad suggested in an interview on Wednesday that the U.S. and another NATO ally, France, could help keep the peace between Turkish proxies and the Kurdish administration of northern Syria.
“We ask the French to send troops to this border to secure the demilitarised zone, to help us protect the region and establish good relations with Turkey,” Ahmad reportedly said, according to the Kurdish outlet Rudaw.
“The United States and France could indeed secure the entire border. We are ready for this military coalition to assume this responsibility,” Ahmad added.
Abdi, the SDF commander, told The Guardian on Thursday that he considers an American troop presence on the ground in northern Syria critical to keeping Kurdish areas secure from SNA attack – and from the Islamic State, which Abdi has consistently identified as a growing threat in interviews following the collapse of the Assad regime.
“The key factor of stabilisation in this area is the US presence on the ground,” Abdi affirmed, predicting that the Islamic State would return as a global threat if President-elect Donald Trump chooses to withdraw the estimated 2,000 known U.S. troops on the ground in the country. Abdi suggested that, without American troops, Syria could fall into “another chaotic situation, and this may lead to another civil war since many factions are threatening the Kurds.”
Abdi predicted that Trump would hesitate to abandon Syria, both because of the rapid changes on the ground in the past two months and a deadly Islamic State attack in the U.S. homeland on New Year’s Eve, targeting New Orleans.
In December, Abdi said in an interview with Western media that the SDF had “halted” joint U.S. operations to contain the threat of ISIS because the SDF could not afford to focus on the Islamic State in light of SNA attacks.
“Generally, the effectiveness of our forces and those of the coalition against ISIS diminishes when we are focused on protecting civilians and our communities, as efforts are redirected toward the ongoing conflict,” he explained. “This is why I say that if the fighting continues and intensifies, it will play into ISIS’s hands.”
Of high concern within Kurdish territory is the existence of camps and prisons housing thousands of Islamic State terrorists and their families, who moved into the “caliphate” to support the construction effort or were born during the “caliphate” era. Fighting between the SDF and SNA could lead to a prison break, Abdi has repeatedly threatened.
Trump has expressed some hesitation with keeping American troops on the ground in Syria, which leaves them open to potentially lethal attacks from a variety of terrorist groups, including HTS. During a press conference in December, Trump described the fall of Assad as an “unfriendly takeover” by Turkey and hinted that Turkey itself could pose a threat to American forces in Syria.
“Well, we had 5,000 troops along the border and I asked a couple of generals,” Trump said, recalling his decision to withdraw from Syria during his first term in office. “So we have an army of 250,000 at Syria and you had an army of 400,000. They have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Erdoğan is somebody I got along with great. But he has a major military force and his has not been worn out with war.”
The generals allegedly told Trump his forces would be “wiped out,” so he “moved them out.”
“I moved them out because I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing. I saved a lot of lives,” Trump added.
While Trump has couched his decision not to send ground reinforcements to the Kurds as necessary to protect American lives, representatives of the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden this week lent credence to Turkey’s insistence that Kurdish forces are a terrorist threat.
United States Acting Under Secretary of State John Bass told reporters on Friday that Biden recognized Turkey’s warning about “the extent to which foreign terrorists, including the PKK, have at times, taken advantage of the situation inside Syria.”
“We are being very careful as a result of that perspective that we have to make sure that any adjustments that we might make to our presence and the activities that the United States forces inside Syria are engaged in to ensure that it doesn’t increase risk or jeopardy for the neighboring countries,” Bass asserted.
Erdogan and his officials threatened the SDF again on Friday, describing them as “separatist terrorists” and threatening them with a “bitter end.”
“They are trying to appeal to those who do not want stability in our region, winking at imperialist powers that thrive on blood and tears,” he said, according to the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency – apparently a reference to America and France. “But no matter what they do, it is futile and pointless.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan declared in separate statements on Friday that the “end of the road is now in sight for the PKK terror group and its affiliates in Syria.”
“We have said it repeatedly. We cannot live with such a threat (from PKK/YPG). Either someone else will take action, or we will,” he asserted.
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