Kurdish lobby struggles to slow US pullout from Syria
An upstart Syrian Kurdish delegation urging the Donald Trump administration to slow the Pentagon pullout from Syria faces significant hurdles to get its message in front of a wary US administration.
Reeling from President Donald Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of Syria, the political wing of the Pentagon-backed Kurdish group that has spent the past four years fighting the Islamic State started the public portion of their 13-day tour of Washington with a bang on Monday, greeting the commander in chief at Trump International Hotel.
It’s not clear how the delegation, led by Ilham Ahmed, happened upon the president. Trump told the group “I love the Kurds” and promised that the US allies are “not going to be killed” by Turkish forces, the Syrian Democratic Committee co-president recalled at a panel earlier this week. The Wall Street Journal reported that the president also said he loved the Turks, the sworn enemy of the group.
The Trump encounter, captured on Twitter by Kurdish allies, reflected the challenges the low-budget outfit faces to get their message in front of the Trump administration as the Pentagon proceeds with a conditions-based withdrawal from Syria.
“It’s kind of like a scrappy gubernatorial campaign,” Nick Heras, a Middle East fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al-Monitor. “That’s what people forget.”
