Trump's peripatetic Syria policy zigzagged again over the weekend. After announcing that the U.S. would withdraw from Northern Syria, Trump changed course, announcing: "We've secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we're going to be protecting it, and we'll be deciding what we're going to do with it in the future."
News
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan protected Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - and U.S. President Donald Trump should have known.
In his national address announcing that U.S. Special Forces killed Baghdadi, Trump commended Turkey while turning a blind eye to Turkey’s collusion with ISIS.
While Trump thanked “the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us,” he downplayed the importance of intelligence provided by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But the SDF’s information was critical to the mission.
Friday, October 25, 2019
By: J. Kenneth Blackwell and David L. Phillips, Voices Contributors
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to “cleanse” northern Syria of Kurds. Though the term “ethnic cleansing” originated during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, genocide and ethnic cleansing are functionally interchangeable. Both are crimes against humanity to which the U.S. must be adamantly opposed.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
By David L. Phillips
Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true. Trump adopted talking points from Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, asserting that the Kurds were killing Christians in northern Syria. The exact opposite is true. Kurds have protected Armenians and Chaldean Christians, while Turkey and its Islamist militias target them. Syria’s Christian population is in peril as a result of Turkey’s invasion, which came on the heels of Trump’s betrayal of America’s allies, the Kurds.