Afrinpost-Khabar24
US President Donald Trump is preparing to meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House on November 13, just weeks after Turkey attacked Kurdish fighters in Syria, even though they are US allies in the war against ISIS.
The game will not end for Ankara until the YPG is completely liquidated and defeated, along with preventing the Kurds from establishing anything like a safe haven, the journalists Sirwan Kajo and Ezel Shahinkaya said that Turkey continued its attacks against the Kurds, and Erdogan expressed his country’s determination to continue the war on “terrorism” in Syria.
The report notes that the Syrian multilateral conflict has prompted the countries involved in it to give priority to achieving their goals and establishing alliances that serve their national interests.
Aaron Stein, director of the Middle East Program at the Institute for Foreign Policy Research, argues that the PKK and the YPG are a policy problem for the United States in running the alliance, but not a security threat.
“For Turkey, the PKK is a threat to national security,” says Stein. “In contrast, ISIS is a threat to US national security. For Turkey, it is a police problem.”
Michael Reynolds, associate professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, points to Turkey’s growing fear that the PKK and YPG will use northern Syria as a base or safe area in an armed conflict to expel the Turks. This concern is not only an obsession with Erdogan, but also the Turkish political spectrum.
Stein believes that while Turkey was concerned about the early US support for the YPG, it was more focused on Bashar al-Assad, and was also the main supporter of the Syrian opposition that sought to overthrow the Assad regime.
“But after Assad regained control of much of the war-torn country with the help of Russia and Iran, Turkey’s priorities shifted to accepting the Assad regime’s forces on Syria’s northeast border with Turkey if the YPG were removed,” the report says.
Stein believes that Turkey has not achieved its desired goal of expelling the YPG from the border, because the Russians used this to intervene. But no matter how the situation develops in northeastern Syria, Turkey is determined to continue fighting Syrian Kurdish fighters.
