Former ambassador discusses the short- and long-term consequences of a recent abrupt U.S. policy change in Syria
BRATTLEBORO—Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith has had a longstanding and close relationship with the Kurdish people in Syria and Iraq.
So when President Donald J. Trump made the decision on Oct. 6 to withdraw U.S. forces from Kurdish-held northeast Syria and gave the OK to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan to invade, the Townshend resident took it personally.
The title of Galbraith’s annual talk to the Windham World Affairs Council, “The Betrayal of the Kurds,” which took place Nov. 9, left little doubt about how he feels about Trump’s actions.
Galbraith, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1993 to 1998, made his first visit to Syria in 1984 and, since 2014, has made a number of visits to the country’s northeast area, which is controlled by the Kurds.
His last visit was in September, just a few weeks before the U.S. withdrawal and subsequent Turkish offensive.
The picture painted by Galbraith of the events of the past few weeks in Syria was a dark one, and a large crowd at Centre Congregational Church listened intently.
The current situation
In the years since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, Galbraith said Syria has become “essentially divided along the Euphrates River” with the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad controlling the two-thirds of the country south and west of the Euphrates, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) controlling nearly one-third of the country east of the river.
With the help of about 3,000 U.S. Special Operations forces and CIA operatives, plus U.S. air power, Galbraith said the SDF had defeated the forces of the Islamic State (ISIS), which at its peak of power in 2014 controlled more of Syria than either the Kurds or the Assad government.
More than 11,000 Kurds and five Americans died in the fighting.
Galbraith said the Kurds “were terrific partners” in the fight against ISIS in Syria and, with U.S. support, were able to recapture all of the territory that had been under ISIS control.
Three days after President Trump’s announcement, Galbraith said Turkish forces invaded Syria and swept into the Kurdish cities along the Syrian border. Shelling and air strikes killed hundreds and drove 200,000 civilians from their homes.
Erdoǧan has claimed that the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant Syrian political party, is aligned with the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 35-year insurgency with a goal of seeking some form of autonomy and rights for the Kurds.
Turkey, the European Union, and the U.S. all have designated the PKK as a terrorist organization, but Galbraith said that not a single terrorist attack on Turkish soil had originated in Syria by the PYD, and while there are ties between the PYD and PKK, the Kurds in northeast Syria posed no threat to Turkey.
Additionally, Galbraith said that Turkey only recently has lumped the PYD with the PKK, and that Erdoǧan’s shift “was not about terrorism, it was about domestic politics.”
Kurds in Turkey had once supported Erdoǧan’s political party, but in 2014, the Turks stood by while ISIS — armed with U.S. weapons captured from the Iraqi army — slaughtered thousands of Kurds along the Syria–Turkey border.
As a result, the Kurds abandoned Erdoǧan in the 2015 elections. Galbraith said that was when Erdoǧan began denouncing the PYD as terrorists and ended peace talks with the PKK.
Aside from the political machinations, Galbraith said something else was happening in Kurdish territory. There, the Kurds created a society based on the political philosophy of Vermonter Murray Bookchin, adopting the tenets of strict gender equality, direct democracy based on representing communities, and radical environmentalism.
While Galbraith said the Kurds weren’t too big on environmentalism, they heartily embraced Bookchin’s ideas on gender equality and direct democracy. Local legislative bodies were equally divided by gender, and each town had a male and female co-mayor.
In the Kurdish militia, Galbraith said the Women’s Defense Units fought with the same ferocity and skill as the men, much to the chagrin of ISIS fighters, who believe a jihadi killed by a woman will not achieve martyrdom and the promised 72 virgins in paradise.
The humanitarian crisis
Galbraith said the larger problem unfolding in Syria is the fate of more than 2,000 foreign fighters and more than 10,000 foreign women and children who have been detained by the Kurds.
While those prisoners represent only about 20 percent of the captured fighters and family members, many are the most hard-core followers of ISIS.
Galbraith said that approximately 6,000 children are among the 12,000 foreigners in the Syrian detention camps, and they are being held under “appalling” conditions. The most heartbreaking cases are the children who were born to mothers who were raped by ISIS fighters.
He said that the women who run the camps where the children are detained are indoctrinating them with ISIS ideology, and the fear is that the longer the children are detained, the more likely they will grow up radicalized.
Meanwhile, the children are stuck in these camps with their mothers, and countries have been unwilling to repatriate them together. Galbraith said this has left the mothers facing the choice of freedom for themselves and leaving their kids in the camps, or staying in the camps indefinitely and watching their children grow up to be “the next generation of jihadis.”
Some 600 orphans had been repatriated before the Turkish invasion, Galbraith said, but thousands wait for release.
A new power in the Middle East
A couple of weeks before Trump’s change of policy on Syria, Galbraith was in the region to talk with Syrian Kurdish leaders who were wrestling with this question: Could they count on the United States to deter an attack by Turkey, or should they make a deal with the Assad government for their protection?
They trusted the Trump administration, but that trust was broken with its sudden decision to withdraw U.S. forces.
Galbraith said the Kurds quickly chose the other option.
Facilitated by Russia, the Kurds worked out a security deal with Assad and gave him “his biggest victory in the nearly nine-year civil war: the recovery of one-third of his country without firing a single shot.”
This, he said, marked the end of what he called the Camp David Era of U.S. dominance in the Middle East “thanks to Trump and what he has done.”
This era began in 1974 with the United States successfully convincing then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to switch sides from the Soviet Union. Flipping what was then the most important Arab country ushered in the U.S. as the main power broker in the region for nearly five decades.
Now, Galbraith said, Russia is filling that role, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is poised to do what none of his Soviet predecessors could — split Turkey from NATO and start the breakup of Russia’s main adversary since the Cold War years.
Every country in the region, Galbraith said, now sees the clear lesson that was delivered to the Kurds: Russia (and Iran, which has backed the Assad government) sticks by its allies, and the United States does not.
While things are now relatively quiet in the region, Galbraith said that if the situation changes, “Who is going to join us? The answer is nobody.”
In the end, Galbraith said Putin is the biggest winner.
“What is Putin’s goal? It is to break up NATO, diminish American leadership and influence in the world, and damage the European Union. And who is his ally in all this? The president of the United States.”