Articles

By David L. Phillips

Devotion and sacrifice are fundamental to faith. As Evangelicals gather in Miami on January 3 to launch “Evangelicals for Trump”, we reflect on these values and their current relevance.

The engagement of Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State exemplified devotion and sacrifice. At America’s behest, more than 11,000 Kurds died and 23,000 were wounded vanquishing the ISIS caliphate, the epicenter of evil in the world today. After the Kurds helped destroy the caliphate, President Donald J. Trump gave Turkey and its Islamist mercenaries a green light to invade and occupy the historic Kurdish and Christian homeland in Syria.

The betrayal of Kurds recalls Matthew 26:47-56

“While he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people.  Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I will kiss is the man; seize him.’ And he came up to Jesus at once and said, ‘Greetings, Rabbi!’ And he kissed him.  Jesus said to him, ‘Friend, do what you came to do.’ Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him.”

Trump’s embrace of the Kurds was the kiss of death. Trump also turned a blind eye on Turkey's killing of Christians in Syria -- Armenians, Syriacs, and Chaldeans.

Shame upon him who betrays the faithful.

While the First Amendment guarantees the right to debate Trump’s suitability for office, there can be no debate that his actions in Syria caused hundreds to die and thousands to suffer.

Mr. Phillips served as Senior Adviser and Foreign Affairs Expert at the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau of the State Department during the Bush administration. He is currently Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columba University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. His recent book is The Great Betrayal: How America Abandoned the Kurds and Lost the Middle East.

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.

There is a long list questions over Turkey’s relationship with ISIS.

Turkey increased support for jihadists after Syrian President Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, in September 2013.

Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT) is reported to have provided weapons, money, and logistical support to extremist groups that evolved into ISIS. Wounded ISIS warriors regularly showed up at Turkish hospitals in Gaziantep to receive medical care. 

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi founded ISIS in the spring of 2014. ISIS attacked Mosul and Sinjar in June, terrorising Yezidis and Kurds. Over five years, the so-called ISIS caliphate grew to the size of Great Britain, with eight million people under its control.

According to the SDF, “Turkey provides all kinds of support to the terrorist groups. These forces, trained and funded by Turkey are engaged in a planned ethnic cleansing against our people.” Turkish-backed jihadists commit crimes on a daily basis in Turkish occupied areas in Syria such as Afrin, Azzaz, al-Bab, Jarablus and Idlib.

In March 2019, the SDF drove ISIS out of its last redoubt in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz. From its interrogation of hardcore ISIS fighters, the SDF learned that Baghdadi had moved to Idlib in northwest Syria. Discovering Baghdadi in Idlib was a surprise to everyone who believed he was hiding in eastern Syria or western Iraq, near his ancestral village.

Baghdadi ended up at a compound in Barisha just 5 km from the Turkish border. The area around Barisha is controlled by Turkish-backed forces. Dozens of Turkish military outposts are located near the border and security is tight.

There was a network of tunnels beneath Baghdadi’s Barisha compounded. All the tunnels were sealed except for one. Since the tunnel network was destroyed by a U.S. air strike, we do not know if the tunnel was an escape route leading to a nearby Turkish military base, or to Turkey itself.

In contrast to mounting evidence that Turkey protected Baghdadi, the Kurds were indispensable to the Baghdadi operation. U.S. helicopters took off from Hareer Air Force Base outside Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. Incirlik Air Force base is much closer, but the Pentagon evidently did not trust the Turkish government to make them a partner.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu exaggerated Turkey’s role. “Turkey and our U.S. counterparts shared information, exchanged opinions before the operation to kill Daesh leader started. That’s why Trump thanked Turkey in his speech,” the minister said, using an Arabic name for ISIS.

In fact, Turkey played no active role. According to a U.S. official, “Turkey did not provide any assistance in this operation. [Baghdadi] was located right next to its border … That shows you how little they do on countering ISIS.” An Iraqi official indicated that Baghdadi was killed “after his hiding place was discovered when he tried to get his family out of Idlib toward the Turkish border”.

The SDF provided critical information. Mazloum Kobani, the SDF commander, heralded the “joint effort over more than fives months between military intelligence of the SDF and U.S. Forces.”

He explained how the SDF “documented over the past months the presence of high ranking ISIS leaders, including Baghdadi, in areas under control of the Turkish state.” According to Kobani, “the operation was delayed for more than a month due to Turkish aggression in our region.”

The U.S. after-action report will reveal how Turkey, a NATO ally, colluded with Baghdadi over many years and protected him from capture. Turkey’s present leadership cannot be trusted. The SDF is America’s real friend in Syria - not Turkey.

Click here to read the article at Ahval.

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.

The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 who explained, "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action." Genocide was the legal basis of the Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted in 1948, requires states to intervene, whereas ethnic cleansing has no explicit or implied legal obligation.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide outlines acts that constitute genocide if they are done “with the intent to destroy an ethnic, national, racial or religious group.” These include:

- Killing members of the group

- Causing serious bodily or mental harm

- Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part

“Ethnic cleansing” is a complementary term first used by the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, to characterize Serbia’s treatment of Muslims and non-Serbs during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It may seem like a more benign and antiseptic term, but genocide and ethnic cleansing both describe crimes against humanity. 

As U.S. officials, and in our private capacities, we struggled to prevent ethnic cleansing by Serbs in Bosnia. We applauded in 1995 when the United States went to war to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and, in 1999, U.S. forces intervened to prevent what happened in Bosnia from happening in Kosovo. In both instances, we championed the rights of Muslims. We were proud that the U.S. went to war to defend defenseless victims.

In 1998, we visited Southeast Turkey to document the systematic killing and displacement of ethnic Kurds. Turkey cited counter-terrorism to justify its crimes, which resulted in the deaths of 40,000 people and the displacement of millions. We testified to the UN Human Rights Commission on Turkey’s abuses.

Today, Turkey is practicing genocide again. Turkish troops and their jihadist mercenaries invaded northern Syria in October 2019. Erdogan vowed to “clear” the Kurds from the border area. Clear is a euphemism for cleanse, which is another way of saying genocide.

President Trump’s turning a blind eye to Erdogan’s murderous action against a U.S. ally who joined our fight against ISIS is a problem. The President said the Turks needed a swath of Syria to be “cleaned out” of Kurds -- this may be seen by many as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing. Regardless of the language or legal semantics, the U.S. should always oppose genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The U.S. has historically tried to be a force for good in the world. We opposed Hitler’s genocide. Bombed the Serbs to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. Launched the Gulf War to keep Saddam Hussein from using chemical weapons.

By allowing ethnic cleansing to remove the Kurds from northern Syria, the U.S. may be seen as an accomplice to Erdogan’s war crimes. The U.S. must oppose genocide in all its forms and in whatever name.

J. Kenneth Blackwell is the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. David L. Phillips is Director of Columbia University’s Program on Peace-building and Rights. He served as a senior adviser and foreign affairs experts at the State Department during the administrations of President Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

Click here to read the article at The Christian Post.

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. 

Turkey has a sordid history. It was responsible for the 1915 Armenian genocide and, more recently, as a state sponsor of terrorism. Beginning in 2013, Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, under Erdogan’s instruction, operated the jihadi highway from Sanliurfa to Raqqa, the capital of the ISIS caliphate, providing weapons, money, logistics and medical services to more than 40,000 ISIS fighters from about 80 countries who transited through Turkey to Syria. Thousands of Turks also joined the ranks of ISIS.

When ISIS invaded Iraq and Syria in June 2014, with Turkish-backing, it targeted “apostates” – Shiites, Kurds, Yezidis, and Christians. Mosul’s 60,000 Christians were executed, displaced or trafficked as sex slaves. The same fate befell Christians in the Nineveh Plains and northern Syria. ISIS converted ancient churches into mosques, madrassas, and prisons. They tore down crosses and used chisels to deface tombstones in church graveyards.

The jihadist magazine, Dabiq, displayed images of crucified Christians as “a message in blood written to the Nation of the Cross”. It featured a picture of St. Peter’s Square with an ISIS flag superimposed atop its holy obelisk. The ISIS leader said his fighters would march “all the way to Rome,” and along the way, “break the crosses [and] trade and sell their women.”

Armenians in Syria were terrified about Turkey coming in, because of what Turkey did to their parents and grandparents 100 years ago. Kessab, an Armenian Christian town in the northwest, was attacked by jihadists, with support from the Turkish military, who advanced from the village of Gözlekçiler on Turkish territory. Thousands of jihadists used five different border crossings to cross unimpeded from Turkey. Many cars with Syrian license plates were observed ferrying fighters from the Turkish base at Kayapinar. In Kessab, 670 families were uprooted and 15 families taken hostage. Three Armenian churches in Kessab were desecrated by the jihadists. Syria’s Christian population was 250,000 in 2011. Only 30,000 remained by the end of 2016.

Syriacs are the second largest Christian community in Syria. Assyrian civilization dates back to 2,500 BC when Assyria was an ancient Mesopotamian kingdom spanning northern Iraq and the Nineveh plains. Assyrians, who pioneered the ancient Aramaic alphabet, self-identify as Syriacs, Arameans, and Chaldeans.

The Syriac Orthodox Church traces its history to St. Peter and St. Paul in the first century AD. Jesus spent some of His ministry in Syria and made Peter the first Pope while in Syria. Its Metropolitan, or religious leader, is believed to be the successor of Christ’s apostles and Saint Peter. Many Syriacs hailed from Hasaka, living alongside Kurdish neighbors, with whom they enjoyed good relations.

Christian churches and institutions, including schools and hospitals, were destroyed by Turkish –backed militias. The beheading of priests and community leaders was filmed in ISIS-execution videos, which included images of eleven desecrated churches. Hundreds of Syriacs were executed, thousands displaced, and scores of churches destroyed. Nuns were kidnapped and raped. In February 2015, jihadists attacked 35 Assyrian Christian villages along the Khabour River, causing 3,000 to flee. Jihadists ransomed their Assyrian captives for $100,000 each.

Turkish-backed militias offered a stark choice: convert and pay for protection, or die. According to the Syriac Union Party, “More than 100,000 Syriac Christians, one of the world's oldest Christian communities, fear Erdogan will finish the genocide that ISIS started.”

Starting with the onset of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Syria’s Christians were under threat from all sides including the regime and opposition militant groups -- but not from the Kurds. More than 11,000 Kurds in the Syrian Defense Forces, which included Christians, died fighting ISIS at America’s behest.

Bassam Ishak, President of the Syriac National Council of Syria, warned of a “horrible situation” if the U.S. pulled its troops from northern Syria.  "As soon as people hear that Turkish forces or their Syrian rebel allies are coming, the Christians will start fleeing." The evangelist, Rev. Pat Robertson, stated, "As the U.S. prepares to draw down, Syrian Christians fear they'll be wiped out. It appears U.S. policy has the potential to put 2,000 years of Christian tradition and history at risk." Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, reflected that Turkey’s invasion “did shake the evangelical community…”. Franklin Graham, a prominent evangelist, said, “If this continues, you’ll have another million people displaced in Syria.” According to the Southern Baptist Convention, "Kurdish Christians (and others among the brave Kurds) have stood up for the United States and for freedom and human dignity. What they are now facing from Erdogan's authoritarian Turkey is horrifying beyond words."

Most Americans are outraged by America’s retreat in Syria and Trump’s green light for Erdogan’s genocide. Metro Detroit has an estimated 160,000 Chaldean Christians. About 500,000 Chaldean/Assyrians reside throughout the United States, particularly in Arizona, California, and Illinois.

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, self-professed evangelicals, have been silent in the face of Turkey’s aggression. Without Kurdish protection, Chaldean-Christians fear that Turkey will complete the work that ISIS tried to do, eradicating Christians from northern Syria.

Trump and his team are parroting Erdogan’s propaganda that Kurds are the perpetrators of attacks on Syria’s Christians. Trump has no understanding and little empathy for the impact his policies have on Christians in northern Syria. Trump’s big lie makes him complicit in Turkey’s crime. Christians are endangered by Trump’s ill-advised pull-out and abandonment of the Kurds.

David L. Phillips is Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He served as a senior adviser to the State Department during the administrations of President Clinton, Bush, and Obama. His recent book is The Great Betrayal: How America Abandoned the Kurds and Lost the Middle East.