Two senators, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are threatening to impose a raft of sanctions on our treaty ally Turkey unless it comes to a “sustained ceasefire” with the American-backed Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces now parked in northeastern Syria. Those terms would also include a demilitarized zone.
“In the wake of the Assad regime’s fall, Turkish-backed forces have ramped up attacks against our Syrian Kurdish partners, once again threatening the vital mission of preventing the resurgence of ISIS,” the senators wrote this week. They added that “While Turkey has some legitimate security concerns that can be addressed, these developments are undermining regional security, and the United States cannot sit idly by.”
This ratcheting up of rhetoric comes as Turkish troops are believed to be amassing along a portion of Turkey’s border with Syria — and as the fledgling post-Assad government at Damascus is still wrestling with its own structure and composition.
One major complicating factor is that America maintains about 900 troops in northeast Syria, which support the SDF in its effort to eradicate ongoing threats from ISIS. Another is that Turkey accuses some of those Syrian Kurdish partners of being allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which Ankara — and, among others, America — considers to be a terrorist group.
The senators stated that Turkey has refused to extend a ceasefire that Washington already helped to mediate and that had allowed the Kurdish-led SDF to withdraw from the town of Manbij, in the Aleppo Governorate. They said Turkey “has refused to extend the ceasefire, including an offer for a demilitarized zone along the border, particularly the city of Kobani.”
This is not the first time that Messrs. Van Hollen and Graham have reached into the sanctions toolkit to put pressure on President Erdogan. The issue was already cooking in 2019, when President Al-Assad was still in power. The sanctions they now propose would inter alia bar Mr. Erdogan from visiting America, prohibit American military assistance to Turkey, and sanction some Turkish banks and activities in the energy sector. They would also have the Department of the Treasury proceed with sanctions over a Turkish decision to acquire the S-400 Russian missile defense system.
There is competing leverage at work, and arguably right now Turkey has more. It was the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army that, along with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, helped capture Aleppo, the first domino that knocked down the house of Assad.
Secretary of State Blinken has met with Mr. Erdogan again, but the results of that meeting were scant. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that Washington wants to see the “establishment of a Syrian national government that encompasses all of the various ethnic groups inside Syria.” He also stated that “We understand the very legitimate concerns that Turkey has about the terrorist threat that the PKK poses.”
That statement would appear to be at odds with the strong language associated with sanctions and underscores how
Ankara could use to its advantage the gray area between the outgoing Biden and incoming Trump administrations.
In any case, the power of sanctions to sway Ankara, should they come to pass, is likely to be margina. Despite the myriad sanctions levied against Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine, overall the Russian economy has still been growing.
Turkey’s economy is moving along at a faster clip than ours. Turkish businesses stand to rake in the lira as millions of Syrians head home and look for the nearest competent contractors — right across the border — to get things fixed.
Also, as when it comes to strategic issues concerning the Mediterranean Sea, Turkey is the country with the most boots on the ground, so to speak — as neighbors like Greece are well aware. As a measure of how blurry this picture is — for Washington, if not Ankara — consider an Al Jazeera headline, “Trump lauds ouster of Syria’s al-Assad as ‘unfriendly takeover’ by Turkey.”
In his first term, President Trump wanted to withdraw the American troops that are still backing the SDF. As president-elect, he has stated that America “should have nothing to do” with Syria. Whether Mr. Trump is being isolationist by putting America first (as he tends to see it), prescient, or a mix of both is debatable, but clearly the ability of Washington to direct traffic in some global hotspots is limited regardless of who is sitting in the White House.
Even in these times when seismic global events fast become yesterday’s news, pictures are sometimes worth a thousand words. The images of thousands of Syrians celebrating the fall of the despotic Assad regime are still fresh — and underscore that events in all areas of Syria will likely be driven by people and forces on the ground.
