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"Sykes-Picot
On Acid": US Considering Syria Partition Plan Amidst Troop Exit
5
January, 2019
The
White House-appointed Syria and anti-ISIL coalition envoy James
Jeffrey has asked Syrian Kurdish leaders backed by the United
States to
hold off on making any deals with President Bashar al-Assad’s
government while the Trump administration tries to develop its
strategy.
As we predicted the longer it takes to withdraw troops, the more time
the blob of Washington hawks has to put obstacles in the way of a
true and full US pullout.
Meanwhile
according to The
Wall Street Journal Turkey
is putting pressure on the US to provide "substantial
military support, including airstrikes, transport and logistics" in
support of Turkey's supposed ISIS fight in Syria. So a mere little
over two weeks following Trump's announced Syria draw down, it
appears we could be right back to a square one quagmire.
Or
perhaps the US deep state will send things further into a "forever
war" indefinite quagmire, the polar opposite of Trump's stated
desire to "bring our youth back home where they belong!" — as
the president declared following
the initial troop pullout announcement, per the below alarming
commentary from the
WSJ:
The Turkish requests are so extensive that, if fully met, the American military might be deepening its involvement in Syria instead of reducing it, the officials added. That would frustrate President Trump’s goal of transferring the mission of finishing off Islamic State to Turkey in the hope of forging an exit strategy for the U.S. military to leave Syria.
But to
"frustrate President Trump's goal" is precisely the
point among the many Iran hawks, Syrian regime change promoters,
neocons and liberal interventionists alike filling the ranks of the
State Department and influential DC think tanks.
This
comes just as a senior State Department official reiterated to
the WSJ:
“We have no timeline for our military forces to withdraw from Syria.”
So
the two key messages now coming out of the administration are "no
timeline" and "no vacuum" which can be generally
summarized as given any US pullout of northeast Syria, the US doesn't
want pro-Turkish forces to slaughter the Kurds, but neither
does the US want the Kurds to strike a deal with Assad to handover
territory to Damascus.
I think other people have already covered what a terrible idea this is, so I'll just share an Ottoman ethnographic map from the end of WWI which, ironically, laid claim to both the Turkish and Kurdish inhabited regions (in pink) while writing off the Arab regions (in green).
See Nicholas Danforth's other Tweets
However,
it's likely too late, as the
Kurds have already begun inviting
Syrian forces into previously autonomous SDF/Kurdish zones.
According
to the
WSJ,
the administration's Syria envoy has a plan that seeks to mitigate
the risks of either a Kurdish slaughter or an Assad takeover. The
plan is visualized in a classified, undisclosed map that
proposes something officials have described as “Sykes-Picot
on acid”:
Mr. Jeffrey and his State Department team have created a color-coded map of northeastern Syria in an attempt to negotiate a power-sharing plan that could avert a costly Turkish-Kurdish fight in the area.
However, keeping their forces apart should Mr. Erdogan’s troops enter Syria could prove difficult. One former U.S. official described the map as “Sykes-Picot on acid,” a reference to the secret post-World War I deal between France and England that carved the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence.
Talks
will be held between US and Turkish defense officials next week in
Ankara, meanwhile the US envoy "has asked Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the
Kurdish commander of Syrian fighters, to hold off on making any deals
with President Bashar al-Assad’s government" while the US
considers its next move.
But
it remains that we've gone from Trump's "full" and
"immediate" troop pullout announced two weeks ago to
current proposals of "Sykes-Picot on acid".
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