Does the United States want to kill three birds with one stone? Then it should withdraw from Syria. It was almost about to do it once; Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Oct. 16, 2019 that former U.S. President Donald Trump had ordered the withdrawal of American forces from northern Syria, a decision that would effectively cede control of the area to the Syrian regime and Russia.

However, it was a half-baked decision as it could allow a resurgence of Daesh. Even Trump's own national security adviser John Bolton had warned the friends and foes of the U.S. that they should not take these words at face value. In response to Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria, his defense secretary Jim Mattis resigned from his cabinet and U.S. anti-Daesh envoy Brett McGurk quit his post. Therefore the Syria withdrawal never materialized. Trump had defended his decision for a while, saying other countries could take care of Daesh but a week or two later, he also dropped the subject. Later, the U.S. military half-heartedly moved a couple of hundred soldiers to U.S. bases in Iraq, claiming that if Daesh reared its ugly head, those soldiers would rush back to their positions. Basically, the soldiers remained where they had been providing assistance to their ally, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK terrorist organization, the YPG, or as it was "christened" by the head of the U.S. special forces, Gen. Raymond Thomas, the "Syrian Democratic Forces." (The general was specifically proud of himself "putting the word ‘democratic’ there.")

I have discussed this issue before but a short reminder could be in order here:

The U.S. forces had been deployed in Syria to fight and defeat Daesh in response to its rapid territorial gains made during the first half of 2014. There are books, videos and articles about the radical, so-called "Sunni Muslim" organization al-Qaida, but how its terrorists shifted from Afghanistan (a country under the U.S. occupation) to Syria (a country under the occupation of its own army and Iran’s Shiite guerilla forces) to form Daesh and occupy 80,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) out of total 186,000 square kilometers of land of Syria is still a mystery. Anyhow, growing human rights abuses and the fear of the Syrian civil war spilling over forced the U.S. to form what is known as the Global Coalition against Daesh in September 2014. Eighty-five nations joined it but only Türkiye’s military actually fought Daesh. The U.S. forces did not join the fight, they simply participated in the search for an ally!

At that time, Türkiye was trying to cope with the Syrian refugee problem with the arrival of 5 million men, women and children as the PKK infiltrated Syria to form the YPG to carry out terrorist activities from across the border. The PKK has a long history of fighting with the local Kurdish tribes since the days its ringleader Abdullah Öcalan fled to Syria before he was captured by Tükiye. Unfortunately, the Syrian Kurds were not as lucky as their Iraqi brethren in their fight against the PKK because Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, had gone after Syrian Kurds several times, forcing them into exile on each occasion they demanded equal rights in the country. Hafez and his son, with the help of their Soviet (later Russian) allies, wrecked the tribal power structures so massively in the name of socialist modernization that Syrian Kurds were not lucky as the Barzani and Talabani tribes in their fight against PKK terrorism. The PKK and its Syrian offshoot the YPG, under the leadership of Öcalan’s adopted son Ferhat Abdi Şahin (also known as Mazloum Abdi and Şahin Cilo), served as the proxies the U.S. was looking for in their so-called fight against Daesh. Ferhat Abdi Şahin joined the PKK when Öcalan was hiding in Syria and participated in terrorist activities in rural areas of Şemdinli, Türkiye in 1996. Later, Abdi joined the high command of the PKK in 2005 and became a member of the special operations board of the HPG, the PKK's armed wing, from 2009 until 2012, when he was sent to Syria to organize the YPG's activities in Kurdish-populated regions of the country amid the then escalating civil war.

The U.S. Central Command knew at that point that Abdi and his assemblage were in reality PKK members. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, during his testimony in Congress, admitted that the YPG was aligned with the outlawed PKK terrorist group. But instead of permitting Türkiye, which was fighting Daesh along the border areas and pushing the group further south, to wipe out Daesh altogether, the U.S. Central Command sent $500 million in cash and thousands of truckloads of artillery, ammunition and other logistical material to create its own "boots on the ground."

Why would they do that? Rather than saving the money and energy needed to create a regular army out of irregular fighting forces that can only act as terrorists, the U.S. Central Command lied to its commander-in-chief Barrack Obama, saying that Turks were pursuing that age-old Ottoman delusion to return to the Arab lands that had been under their occupation for ages. They told President Obama that "if the Turks go into Syria, they are never leaving ever again."

Those who lied to Obama (and later to Trump) stemmed from the Bush administration, coming from his security and diplomacy team who were in cahoots with neo-conservatives trying to correct the mistakes the British and the French made when they were reallocating the Ottoman lands to various people. Now, there was the reality of Israel and once Western-ally Iran’s new rulers, who were sworn enemies. The U.S. needed to create a new country to encurtain Israel from Iran. The Bush team believed that a country would be created during the Gulf War and it would be created by the Iraqi Kurds. However, Iraqi Kurds had fought bitter wars for their local autonomy and the U.S. occupation forces could convince neither Barzani nor Talabani tribes to dismember Iraq.

So, the "Arab Afghans" who fought as proxies of the U.S. and the British against the Soviet occupation now materialized in the middle of the Syrian civil war and provided the best opportunity to retry the idea of board-fencing Israel with a "Kurdish" state. But this time, the YPG "Kurds" were not local Syrians, they were not even Kurds. They were a bunch of terrorists from neighboring Türkiye who could speak only the Turkish dialect of Kurdish, but who cared? Obama did not.

But Turks did.

'Sit down and shut up'

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who specializes in Middle East security issues and, during the administration of President George W. Bush, had served as a senior director in the National Security Council, brought up these facts to Washington policymakers in 2019 at an event titled "After the Syrian Pullback: What Next for U.S. Middle East Policy?"

"The Obama administration packaged this (YPG) as something other than the PKK. It successfully propagandized the American people in that regard, but it didn't successfully propagandize the Turks. They're enraged by it. They have been telling us time and time again that this is destroying relations with them and we chose to ignore it ... And we have, effectively, time and time again told them to sit down and shut up."

Did the Washington elite listen to this plain good sense? No, because as retired Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt of the U.S. Army, who previously served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East affairs during 2006-2008, and the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs during 2008-2009, explains that they started engaging in "mission creep" in "a massive amount that I've never seen before." The general explained it at that Hudson event, "All of a sudden, we started nation-building. We started humanitarian operations. We were going to build a 40,000-man police force so they could be the local police. And there's no doubt in my mind that that would have been a multiyear operation."

That operation is still going on today because the U.S. has a fool’s errand to accomplish: Nation-building where there is no nation. They have spent $5.6 billion in Syria and Iraq, but still, there is no bumper state to protect Israel from Iran, and Iran is inching towards its nuclear bomb and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his armageddon with the Iranian mullahs.

If only they would understand that Türkiye is still a secular country as it was an original member of NATO. "The Türkiye of today has not an increasingly dictatorial, authoritative leader" as then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said two years ago.

Mike Doran in that Hudson event did not mince his words:

"By aligning with the PKK – or actually, allying with the PKK, we set ourselves on a collision course with Turkey. That was unwise from a humanitarian point of view and it was extremely unwise from a strategic point of view."

The U.S. will eventually wise up and come to its strategic senses. It will leave Syria and Iraq as it did Afghanistan. Türkiye will see to it that the territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria will not be violated. This is not a question of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: The vast majority of people in Türkiye want to get rid of terrorism at their borders and for peace to prevail in the area.

The U.S. brought that terrorism to Türkiye’s borders; should they be the ones to take it away?

If they do not, Türkiye will.