Turkey Gears for High-Risk War Against a Familiar Foe in Syria
Turkey Gears for High-Risk War Against a Familiar Foe in Syria
(Bloomberg) -- Turkey’s armed forces face a familiar opponent as they launch a major offensive in northeastern Syria. They have been fighting versions of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, for 35 years.
Never in that time have the Kurds been able to survive in an open battlefield against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s second-largest military, or to hold onto territory for long. Yet nor have they been as well armed, or well trained, as they are today.
With tens of thousands of Turkish troops due to follow the forward units that crossed the border on Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign to create a buffer zone 30 kilometers (19 miles) deep and 480 kilometers long inside Syria faces significant risks.
Last year alone, the Trump administration requested $500 million for the Pentagon to train and equip fighters for the campaign to counter Islamic State in Syria, of which the YPG were the main recipients.
This year’s number was smaller, at $300 million, but it still included proposed requisitions for 25,000 AK-47 rifles, 2,000 light and heavy machine guns, 500 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and sniper rifles, 60 120 millimeter-caliber mortars, 1,020 vehicles and $24 million worth of ammunition.
Turkey has repeatedly asked the U.S. to take those weapons back as the fight against Islamic State has wound down.
Unlike the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party -- the YPG’s sister militia that fought a guerrilla and terrorist campaign in Turkey since 1984 -- the Kurds in northeastern Syria have spent the last few years fighting and training alongside some of the world’s most professional troops, including U.S., British and French special forces.
And it’s the YPG’s connection to the U.S. that worries Turkey’s planners most. “What aggravates the operational risks is the deep-running mistrust between Turkey and the U.S.” said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara. “Turkey is very much worried about whether the U.S. will share intelligence with the YPG over Turkish troop positions to help them defend themselves.”
The YPG have been digging trenches and tunnels in preparation for a Turkish assault since at least December, when U.S. President Donald Trump first announced he was pulling U.S. forces out of Syria (he later back-tracked). According to two Turkish officials familiar with the operation’s planning, the Kurds have also obtained shoulder-launched anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in the course of Syria’s eight-year civil war. Those pose a threat to Turkish armored vehicles and helicopters.
As a result, Turkey may refrain from using helicopter gunships and rely on armed drones, the officials said. This would help to reduce casualty rates, but could also slow the pace of the ground operation, they added. As the offensive began on Wednesday, Turkey launched air and artillery strikes on more than 180 YPG targets. It deployed F-16 combat aircraft as far as 30 kilometers within Syrian airspace on Wednesday, the state-run Anadolu Agency said.
Speed matters. The Turkish military plans to lay siege to the border towns of Kobani, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. All three are held by YPG forces and are situated on the Berlin-Baghdad railway line that forms much of the Turkish-Syrian frontier.
On Wednesday, Turkish television channels carried images of Turkish border towns, where loudspeakers blared the thundering drums and pipes of Ottoman-era marching songs as the operation got under way.
The goal is to penetrate at least 30 kilometers into Syrian territory, securing the M-4 highway that runs parallel to the frontier, all the way to the border with Iraq, the officials said. Turkey wants to complete the operation before the onset of winter, which would make moving tens of thousands of troops, tanks and other vehicles in muddy terrain more difficult, according to a third official familiar with the planning, who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media on the issue.
Turkish forces may also advance against the Kurdish-held towns of Manbij, west of the Euphrates river, and Qamishli in the northeast, moves that could prompt Russian-backed Syrian government army units in the vicinity to try to secure the towns first, the official said.
Turkish troops are due to then move into town centers that are rigged with explosives and destroy underground tunnels, similar to the extensive networks they discovered when driving the PKK from the town of Nusaybin, just over the Turkish side of the border in 2016. The longer the campaign takes, the more opportunity there will be for the Kurds to strike an agreement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that would draw government troops and possibly their Russian backers into the equation.
A rapid victory could also be vital for the struggling Turkish economy. Turkish state banks rushed to prop up the lira this week by selling dollars, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as news of the planned incursion unnerved investors.
Trump angered even Republican supporters with his green light for the Turkish operation, and what they perceived as the betrayal of Kurdish allies in the fight against Islamic State. He has since threatened in a tweet to destroy the Turkish economy if its military should do anything he considers out of bounds.
Both the U.S. and France have expressed concern that Turkey’s war plans could undermine international efforts to defeat Islamic State. As he justified the U.S. withdrawal from Syria through his twitter account this week, Trump also said he was holding Turkey responsible for the thousands of Islamic State jihadists and their relatives currently detained by the YPG.
“We may be in the process of leaving Syria, but in no way have we Abandoned the Kurds, who are special people and wonderful fighters,” he said in one tweet.
“The Turkish Armed Forces is the only coalition and NATO army fighting the Daesh terrorist group hand-to-hand in the field,” the Turkish Defense Ministry said, referring to battles against the jihadists in the North West Syrian town of al-Bab, in 2016. Daesh is another name for Islamic State. “We will continue to fight it in the east of the Euphrates.”
--With assistance from Samuel Dodge, Firat Kozok and Onur Ant.
To contact the reporters on this story: Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara at shacaoglu@bloomberg.net;Marc Champion in London at mchampion7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net, Gregory L. White
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