How Turkey is leveraging the Kurds
By threatening Syrian Kurds, Turkey is settling accounts with its ally, the United States, and trade partner Russia.
These days, deciphering Turkey’s game plan for Syria is no easy task. Turkey's domestic politics, shaped by the struggle against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and the country's foreign policy, which is mired in Syria, are entangled leading up to the Nov. 1 snap elections.
Turkey is once again confronting the United States, which, in its struggle against the Islamic State (IS), scrapped its plans to train moderate Kurdish forces and instead delivered American weapons to a coalition that includes the PKK-affiliated People’s Protection Units (YPG). This time, however, Turkish fury is also directed against Russia, which has become a direct party to the Syrian crisis and upended Turkey’s plans for a buffer zone. Turkey, not willing to take on Moscow directly, so far has limited itself to objections over Russian contacts with the Kurds.
Ankara’s disappointment with the US administration is swelling. Washington doesn’t want to see Syrian Kurds become an ally of Russia and then possibly shift to support the Damascus regime, hence the US decision to work with the Kurds. It was toward this goal that the United States decided to arm a recently formed coalition called the Syrian Democratic Forces that will incorporate Kurdish YPG-YPJ, the Syriac Military Council and the Syrian Arab Coalition (Jaish al-Zuwwar, Burkan al-Firat, Al-Samadid and Al-Jazeera Brigades).
The idea was prompted by the Americans' desire to enlist Arabs in the combat against IS while also soothing Turkey's concerns over the assistance provided to Kurds. Nevertheless, Turkey doesn’t appear to have blessed this formula.
