Washington’s Sum of All Fears: Kurdish SDF Cut a Deal with Damascus

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire

Last night, Kurdish officials in northeastern Syria issued a statement that an agreement has been reached with the government in Damascus allowing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to takeover key strategic positions along the Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

Not surprisingly, cheers can he heard from Damascus to Moscow and Tehran too, while Washington’s foreign policy blob is visibly moaning in agony. The reality of the situation is that Turkey sprung a trap set by Damascus and its allies.

While much of the western mainstream media has focused a ‘Trump’s decision’ to full-out US troops from Syria, there are other factors which are driving the current situation. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been eager to fire-up his AKP base at home and project Neo-Ottoman power regionally, so this latest Turkish foray into Syria can be seen as a resumption of the ‘New Turkey’ – a gradual transformation from a secular, Kemalist state, to an Islamic one. This gradual revolution is not confined to with Turkey’s own borders though, as it hopes to extend its micro-colonial project of Sunnification to include areas in question inside and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. Hence, Ankara has moved its forces into Syrian territory for the third time in as many years, this time dubbed, “Operation Peace Spring,” where Erdogan vowed to secure the country’s national security by stamping-out the Kurdish YPG-PKK ‘terrorist threat’ embedded in northern Syria.

Unknowingly perhaps (or not), Turkey helped towards resolving no less than three problems which had been grating at Damascus and Moscow for the last 3 years. Firstly, the Turkish incursion forced the displacement of US military forces that had been illegally occupying northeastern Syria for the past 3 years, effectively propping-up their SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) Kurdish-led proxy militants, many of whom share membership with Kurdish YPG/PKK militant groups. Without US protection, Kurdish-led forces were immediately exposed to the painful reality that their ‘autonomous’ status in northeastern Syria was only on borrowed time, evidenced by the fact that they could not protect Kurdish residents from the Turkish military and their jihadi vanguard ground forces, formerly known as Free Syrian Army (FSA) who’ve rather cynically rebranded themselves now to the ‘Syrian National Army’. With Kurdish forces now on their back heals, they were left with no other option than to approach Damascus with the aim of negotiating an alliance. The process has already begun with Damascus’s national military force, the SAA, now heading towards key towns and cities in the northeast of Syria including one of the centers of fighting – the hotly contested Syrian border town of Kobani. The Turkish military will not willingly fire upon SAA forces inside of Syrian sovereign territory, although Turkey’s jihadist FSA/SNA militias might engage with its old nemesis.

Reports show the SAA’s arrival in these areas as being met with cheers from crowds – which is public relations disaster for Washington and its Kurdish ‘Rojava’ nation-building project in northern Syria.

Pretty sure CNN and BBC won’t be showing us this footage of Syrians holding huge celebrations in the northern cities of Qamishli and Hasakah to welcome the arrival of #Syria’s Army—the sole defender of the Syrian people. pic.twitter.com/vn8lWdJrwk

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) October 14, 2019

Lastly, aside from securing its its key northern border crossings, Damascus in now one step closer to reclaiming its oil and gas fields which have been continuously occupied by ISIS and SDF forces respectively since 2014. Liberating their domestic energy supply will go a long way towards helping Damascus mitigate some of the economic suffering felt as a result of the imposition of joint EU-US  sanctions, a punitive embargo designed by western powers to strangle the country and foment domestic unrest.

A New Middle East

Moreover, Damascus is a step closer to securing previously vulnerable stretches of is eastern border with Iraq which the US was previously ‘managing’ and which allowed ISIS the move and use as a staging ground for attacks further afield in areas like Sweida and Al Tanf. If a mutual security arrangement can be reached between Syria and Iraq to secure its border, this can potentially revolutionise political and economic affairs in the region, and even globally.

If these events do come to pass, it would be a complete defeat for Washington who have worked long and hard to keep this part of the Middle East unstable and divided. It was only in this US-led and Saudi and Israeli-engineered environment of destablisation that both al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists were able to emerge and thrive for so long. As history demonstrates, both Washington and Israel are not above provoking instability in order to achieve their shared short-term and long-range goals for the region.

Regardless, the board has been flipped in northeastern. Unable to either hold territory or keep thousands of ISIS prisoners in custody, US-backed SDF militias have been exposed as the latest in a long lineage of hapless pawns of Washington in the Great Game. Once keep ground locations are secured by SAA forces, then Damascus can invite Russian air support – an outcome which can only mean that terrorists’ days will be numbered going forward. Any remaining ISIS or Al Qaeda terrorists brigades active in north of the Euphrates will have few remaining escape routes to pursue, other than north to seek refuge in the various AKP-sanctioned terrorist enclaves located across southern Turkey.

As this author said back in early 2018, the US-Kurdish dance in northeastern Syria was always a game of musical chairs, and sooner or later, someone had to leave. And that someone is the USA, and immediately followed by ISIS.

As President Bashar al-Assad said already, Syria is determined to reclaim “every inch” of its territory. So might behoove the west not to underestimate the will and determination of a country and army which has withstood eight years of a fully internationalised regime change war waged against it.

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Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq.

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.