Trump Wants U.S. Troops to Guard Northern Syria’s Oil. The Kurds May Not Welcome Them. By Lara Seligman – Foreign Policy
The Syrian Kurds lost 11,000 fighters in the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State. They agreed not to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And in the weeks leading up to Turkey’s Oct. 9 invasion of northern Syria, they dismantled their defenses along the Turkish border.
So it came as a shock to Ilham Ahmed, the president of executive committee of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), when U.S. President Donald Trump stepped aside as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began a bloody incursion into northern Syria, a campaign that, according to Ahmed, has so far killed at least 250 Kurds, including a large number of children, and forced 300,000 to flee their ancestral homes. Another 300 people have disappeared.
After the abrupt withdrawal, Trump made another reversal, announcing his intent to maintain a small U.S. force in northeastern Syria to keep Assad and his Iranian backers from seizing the region’s rich oil fields.
But this time, the Syrian Kurds will not cave so easily to U.S. demands…