THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |A
A family tries to escape the advance of Turkish-backed forces in the region around the Syrian Kurdish town of Ras al-Ain.DELIL SOULEIMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESthey were prepared to disarm.
Mr. Trump’s Oct. 6 with-
drawal announcement fol-
lowed repeated promises to
extricate the U.S. from what
he called endless wars, as well
as a past call to leave Syria
nearly a year ago.
Current and former admin-
istration officials said the
withdrawal reflected a frac-
tured national security pro-
cess run by advisers divided
between Kurd supporters and
those who leaned toward Tur-
key. One State Department of-
ficial said the president failed
to rein in advisers, even those
with goals at odds with Mr.
Trump’s directives.
Some Pentagon officials
said they shared responsibility
for the chaos because they
didn’t design a more robust
drawdown plan after Mr.
Trump first called for a with-
draw in December. Troops had
only hours to decide what mil-
itary equipment to take, de-
stroy or leave behind.
Mr. Trump’s decision to re-
move troops from Syria was
so abrupt that even staunch
supporters said it marked
America as an unreliable ally.
As the first Turkish forces
moved into Syria on Oct. 9,
Mr. Trump sent a three-para-
graph letter to Mr. Erdogan,
making a last-ditch appeal for
the Turkish leader to make a
deal with Gen. Mazloum Abdi,
the commander of the U.S.-
backed, Kurdish-led, Syrian
Democratic Forces.
“History will look upon you
favorably if you get this done
the right and humane way,”
Mr. Trump wrote. “It will look
upon you forever as the devil
if good things don’t happen.
Don’t be a tough guy! Don’t be
a fool!”
Mr. Erdogan said Friday the
letter lacked respect. His re-
sponse, aides said, was tospoke with his top national se-
curity officials. They spoke in
favor of keeping some U.S.
forces in Syria.
But Mr. Trump was fed up,
officials briefed on the meet-
ings said, insisting he was
done fighting overseas wars.
He ordered about 50 U.S.
troops to abandon two border
outposts where Turkey
planned to attack.
The following day, Mr.
Trump hinted at a full troop
withdrawal, tweeting that it
was time to “get out of these
ridiculous Endless Wars.”
The seeds for Mr. Trump’s
decision were planted in May,
2017, when he agreed to arm
Kurdish fighters for the fight
against Islamic State. Turkey,
which considers the Kurdish
fighters a terrorist threat,
strongly opposed any U.S. plan
to arm its adversaries.
At the time, U.S. officials
gave Mr. Trump two options:
Arm the Kurds and let them
lead the fight, or send at least
10,000 U.S. forces. The Ameri-
can troops would work with
Turkey and its Syrian allies to
seize Raqqa, Islamic State’s
self-declared capital.
“I’m not sending any more
forces into Syria,” Mr. Trump
said, according to a person fa-
miliar with the discussion.
“Arm the Kurds, take Raqqa,
get ISIS out of there, and then
get the hell out of Syria. It’s
sand and blood and death.”
The U.S.-backed, Kurdish-
led forces seized Raqqa in five
months. It took them 17
months to crush the last Is-
lamic State strongholds. For
Mr. Trump, that was supposed
to end American involvement.
Mr. Trump chafed at advis-
ers who urged him to keep
troops in the Middle East, but
his national security team said
publicly that the U.S. would
remain in Syria until Iranianforces were pushed out and Is-
lamic State was eliminated.
Mr. Trump first decided to
leave Syria nearly a year ago,
following a December phone
call with Mr. Erdogan. The
president surprised his aides,
saying he was pulling all 2,
U.S. forces from Syria and
handing Turkey the job of con-
taining Islamic State.
Lawmakers warned it would
be a mistake to abandon the
Kurdish YPG fighters. To Tur-
key, the YPG was an offshoot
of the PKK, a Kurdish militant
group classified as a terrorist
force by both Ankara and
Washington. The U.S. military
played down the links and em-
braced the YPG as an effective
fighting force against Islamic
State.About face
Even then, administration
officials indicated the presi-
dent wouldn’t stop Turkey
from attacking Kurdish forces.
“I think the president
would say to you: that’s not
our fight,” a U.S. official said
atthetime.“TheYPGcer-
tainly was allied with us in the
fight against ISIS, but we were
not allied with the YPG in the
fight against Turkey.”
Mr. Trump shifted his
stance two months later, say-
ing he would keep 200 peace-
keepers in Syria for a time.
U.S. military officials in-
stead cut the number of Amer-
ican troops from 2,000 to
1,000, which The Wall Street
Journal reported in March.
Gen. Joe Dunford, then-chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, disputed the Journal ar-
ticle and said the Pentagon
still planned to reduce troops
to a few hundred.
Mr. Trump took little inter-
est in some details of his pol-
icy decisions, allowing advis-WORLD NEWS
launch the offensive.
“We will not forget,” Mr.
Erdogan said of the letter.
“When the time comes, we will
take the necessary steps.”
U.S. defense officials have
long said a withdrawal from
Syria required a political solu-
tion, a job for diplomats, not
soldiers. Military and diplo-
matic officials warned Mr.
Trump that removing troops
from northeastern Syria be-
fore a deal among Syria’s war-
ring sides and Turkey could
allow Islamic State to regroup,
Over the summer, the
American troop level held
steady at 1,000. Turkey and
the U.S. tried to hammer out
an agreement for the Kurdish
militia known as the YPG torelinquish territory on the
Syrian side of the border with
Turkey.
The U.S. persuaded the YPG
to abandon a few of its border
positions, but that didn’t ap-
pease Mr. Erdogan. During an
Oct. 6 call with Mr. Trump, the
Turkish president said the U.S.
was too slow in setting up a
buffer zone along the border
and that Turkey wouldn’t tol-
erate the situation any longer.
When the two presidents
spoke, Mr. Trump was sur-
rounded by a revamped na-
tional security team. Army
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had
been on the job for a week.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper
had been in place two months.
After the call, Mr. TrumpA haphazard U.S.
retreat from Syria
left Kurdish allies
alone, outgunned.The decision by President
Trump to leave Syria set in
motion events that upended
U.S. policy in the Middle East,
cast doubt on America’s reli-
ability as an ally and allowed
Washington’s adversaries to
fill the void: The Assad regime
strengthens its hold. Russia
expands its influence. And Iran
sees greater freedom to ferry
weapons to allies, posing new
threats to neighboring Israel.
Following a successful five-
year campaign by U.S.-backed
Kurdish forces against Islamic
State, which reduced the mili-
tant threat to Western capi-
tals, Turkey launched an at-
tack on Syrian Kurds, forcing
the besieged group to seek
help from Syria’s president,
Bashar al-Assad.
With the U.S. in retreat,
Syrian and Russian forces are
angling for control of Ameri-
can military bases that until
last week were used to carry
out counterterrorism missions
against Islamic State.
A Russian reporter in a New
York Yankees cap posted a
video of an abandoned U.S.
base in Manbij, Syria, taken
over by Russian and Syrian
fighters. Dining hall refrigera-
tors were still filled with cans
of Coke and Pepsi. Kitchen
shelves were loaded with
bread, bagels and Krispy
Kreme doughnut boxes.
More than 300,000 Syrians
have already fled the fighting.
Cellphone videos posted on-
line last weekend appeared to
show Turkish-backed fighters
executing two prisoners.
“We are sheep for the
slaughter,” said Abu Khalil, a
Kurdish farmer who fled the
Syrian city of Ras al-Ain with
14 family members into Iraq.
More than 1.5 million Kurds
live in northeastern Syria.
Aid groups have suspended
operations and evacuated in-
ternational workers. Syrians
who worked with the groups
have shredded documents that
might link them to Americans,
fearing the Assad regime
would use any evidence to im-
prison, torture or kill them.
Fall out
In Washington, Democratic
and Republican lawmakers ex-
coriated Mr. Trump for ceding
U.S. influence in Syria to Mos-
cow, Tehran and Ankara. The
bipartisan outcry comes as Mr.
Trump faces an intensifying
impeachment investigation.
Turkey agreed to halt its in-
cursion on Thursday after the
U.S. accepted most of Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdo-
gan’s demands, cementing An-
kara’s gains. Violence contin-
ued Friday, and Kurdish
fighters gave no indication
ContinuedfromPageOne
ers to interpret the president’s
wishes in ways supporting
their own views, said current
and former administration of-
ficials involved in the discus-
sions.
That fueled a rift between
administration officials who
saw the Kurdish fighters as
critical partners, and those
who saw them as Turkey did—
a threat. Mr. Trump expected
the Syrian withdrawal to move
forward. After years of balanc-
ing competing Kurdish and
Turkish interests, Trump ad-
ministration policy began to
shift toward Ankara.
While Mr. Trump made
clear his intention to withdraw
U.S. forces from Syria, admin-
istration officials told Kurdish
leaders that America planned
to be there for the long haul.
One U.S. official defending
administration policy said
Washington tried to make its
Kurdish partners understand
that their relationship with
the U.S. was “temporary,
transactional and tactical.”
As soon as Turkey launched
its attack, the U.S. realized
that the fighting wouldn’t be
limited to a small 70-mile
stretch of the Turkey-Syria
border, as first expected.
Cross-border shelling spread
across the 300-mile border
where Kurds controlled the
Syrian side.
Two days into the offensive,
Turkish artillery shells landed
hundreds of yards from a hill-
side military base near Kobani,
where American troops were
stationed. U.S. officials con-
cluded that it was a deliberate
attack, intended to prompt Mr.
Trump to order all American
troops out of Syria. Turkey de-
nied targeting Americans.
As the shelling intensified
around Kobani, residents fled
south toward the LaFarge Ce-
ment Factory, which served as
the headquarters for the U.S.-
led coalition. Soldiers turned
the families away.
A video shot near the U.S.
base showed a woman in a
crowd confronting the U.S. co-
alition forces. “You should all
leave us if you are not going to
stop this war,” she said in
Kurdish, translated to English
on the video. “Until when are
we supposed to live with this?
Shall all our children get killed
before you do something?”
Hussein Ibrahim fled Syria
with his wife and daughter af-
ter a mortar landed in the
yard of their house in the Syr-
ian border town of Ras al-Ain.
Mr. Ibrahim, 52 years old, al-
ready a refugee once before in
the conflict, had just finished
refurbishing the family’s house
when Turkey invaded.
“There is a saying that
Kurds have no friends but the
mountains and it’s true,” he
said. “We are always betrayed
by our friends and this is the
biggest betrayal of all.”
—Vivian Salama and
Michael Gordon in
Washington, Sune
Rasmussen in Duhok, Iraq,
and Raja Abdulrahim in
Istanbul contributed to this
article.U.S. Makes
Hasty Exit
From Syria
The fate of the cease-fire
agreement negotiated by the
U.S. and Turkey in northeast-
ern Syria was in flux Friday, as
skirmishes erupted between
Turkish and Syrian Kurdish
forces and questions arose
about the boundaries of a buf-
fer zone from which the Kurds
are expected to withdraw.
President Trump said his
Turkish counterpart, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, told him in a
phone call that “minor sniper
and mortar fire” had stopped.
Mr. Erdogan dismissed the
clash reports as “disinforma-
tion.” A U.S. official said most
of the fighting has ended but
it would take time for orders
to stop the combat to filter
through the ranks.
The deal reached Thursday
commits Turkey to suspending
its military incursion into
Kurdish-held areas for 120
hours in return for a U.S.
pledge to facilitate a with-
drawal of Syrian Kurdish fight-
ers from the border area. The
Kurds were allied with the U.S.
in the fight against Islamic
State but Ankara regards them
as a terrorist threat.
The agreement didn’t spec-
ify the size of what Turkey re-
fers to as the safe zone. But
Mr. Erdogan said there should
be no confusion that Turkey
plans to seize control over a
roughly 20-mile by 300-mile
area stretching from the city
of Manbij all the way to Syria’s
border with Iraq on the east.
“This is what we call the
safe zone,” Mr. Erdogan told
reporters, circling the area on
a large map.
The Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces have said
that the zone proposed to
them was significantly nar-
rower than the one described
by Mr. Erdogan. The SDF has
said it would abide by the five-
day cease-fire, but there were
no signs they were pulling
back from the area on Friday.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark
Esper didn’t comment on the
size of the buffer zone, but
said the U.S., which has with-
drawn its troops from combat
areas, would have no role in
enforcing it.
A senior U.S. defense offi-
cial said that the U.S. would
continue to watch over the
area with drones, to maintain
surveillance of conditions on
the ground and prison camps
where Kurdish forces are hold-
ing Islamic State fighters.
People living near the Syr-
ian border town of Ras al-Ainand two officials in the SDF,
reported that sporadic clashes,
drone strikes and artillery
shelling resumed overnight
and increased into the morn-
ing. One strike hit a hospital in
Ras al-Ain, according to the
Kurdish Red Crescent.
SDF commanders appealed
for a pause in fighting. “As part
of the agreement the clashes
must stop and the strikes must
stop,” SDF commander Khabour
Akaad said. “But until now it
hasn’t stopped.”
Col. Fateh Hassoun, a com-
mander in the Turkish-backed
forces, blamed the Kurds for
the clashes. “Some of the SDF
mercenaries are still firing
mortars in Ras al-Ain and
fighting,” he said. “The other
areas have small clashes.”
Turkey’s incursion marks a
pivotal chapter in the multi-
sided Syrian war. The Trump
administration’s decision this
month to withdraw its troops
from northeastern Syria has
created a vacuum for Presi-
dent Bashar al-Assad’s govern-
ment and his ally, Russia, to
fill. It has also forced the SDF
to weigh whether to fight Tur-
key alone or throw their lot in
with Mr. Assad.
Mr. Erdogan said he
wouldn’t negotiate with Kurd-
ish forces but conceded that
much had yet to be discussed
with Russia to achieve his
safe-zone goal. The Turkish
president said he was con-
cerned that Kurdish fighters
would seek support from Mr.Assad and Russian troops in
cities where they are present.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin, who is set to host Mr.
Erdogan in the Russian resort
town of Sochi on Tuesday, has
made clear he would accom-
modate only a limited Turkish
incursion in Syria. On Friday,
spokesman Dmitry Peskov said
the Kremlin expected informa-tion from Ankara on the cease-
fire agreement.
Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, who helped negotiate
the pause brokered by Vice
President Mike Pence, said
during a stop in Brussels that
he is very hopeful the agree-
ment will hold. He also said
that European countries must
help solve the crisis of Syrianrefugees in Turkey and take
back Islamic State fighters be-
ing held in northern Syria.
“Europe needs to seriously
consider how to respond to
this, this threat, this challenge
that’s presented by migra-
tion,” he said.
—Gordon Lubold and Vivian
Salama in Washington
contributed to this article.BySune Engel
Rasmussenin Duhok,
Iraq, andRaja
AbdulrahimandDavid
Gauthier-Villars
in IstanbulSyria Cease-Fire Is Marred by Clashes
Turkey says it plans a
large buffer zone as
sporadic fighting
breaks out
DELIL SOULEIMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Civilians have been caught up in Turkey’s military campaign in Syria, where skirmishes continued.