• Home
• /
• Opinion

European troops should replace US forces in Syria

It behoves France, Britain and Germany to step up to the plate instead of wringing their hands in frustration

Europe should launch a vigorous military cum diplomatic initiative post-haste so that the void that will be left in northeastern Syria by departing American soldiers does not prompt regional powers to rush in. For all the rejoicing in Ankara, Tehran, Moscow and Damascus, the winners of a multi-sided power struggle are likely to be armed groups and violent extremists, of which Daesh is just one. The resulting bloodbath and insurgencies could make the mayhem of 2014 and 2015 seem like a picnic.
The warning from Turkey's foreign minister to France against keeping its forces in Syria should be treated in fact as a signal for European powers to replace the 2,000-strong US contingent with a deterrent force of their own to help the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) maintain the status quo. After all, the SDF soldiers are battling Daesh diehards in the semi-autonomous region not merely for their own sake. As the French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy wrote in a 2017 essay, "over a front a thousand kilometres long, the Iraqi Kurds have held off the barbarians and, thus, saved Kurdistan, Iraq and our shared civilization".
Evidently not all civilization concurs with that opinion. After using a panoply of intimidatory tactics against the Syrian Kurds without success since their bloody battles with Daesh in Kobani and Raqqa, the Turkish government feels the time has finally come to annihilate the YPG-dominated SDF, ostensibly for the Syrian Kurdish militia's loyalty to the political ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of Turkey's outlawed Kurdish group PKK.
"They can dig tunnels or ditches if they want, they can go underground if they want, when the time and place comes they will buried in the ditches they dug," Turkey's defence minister has been quoted as saying, presumably referring to the YPG fighters.
Such words from the lips of a minister of a NATO member state should come as no surprise given that the commander in chief of the country on which the military alliance has traditionally depended for leadership, nowadays frequently disparages it, accuses allies of free-riding on the US and dumps on his European counterparts as if they were enemies.
To be fair to Donald Trump, he had served notice on the Pentagon and the Syrian Kurds way back in March, saying: "Very soon, we're coming out." After that, his administration refused to spend $230 million earmarked for recovery efforts in the war-torn but oil-rich area that constitutes more than one-quarter of Syrian territory. It claimed the freeze would be offset by $300 million pledged by anti-Daesh coalition partners, even though the cost of stabilisation is estimated at billions of dollars.
Those events left the Kurdish authorities worried they could be wrong-footed by a shock troop withdrawal given the long record of betrayals by US administrations. So they began to reach out to officials in Damascus for an arrangement - presumably guaranteed by Moscow, which has been battling Daesh separately - under which they would retain a large measure of autonomy in a unified Syria.
While the leaders of Turkey, Iran and Russia figure out ways to make the most of the opportunity in Syria without coming to blows, there is little doubt that Daesh will continue to regroup and escalate attacks against the SDF. A resurgent Daesh would pose a threat to Europe with its capacity for inspiring terrorist attacks and triggering another mass flight of Syrian Arabs and Kurds. The shifting alignments and privations of war would also enable Al Qaeda-linked groups to attract recruits in the name of battling foreign invaders.
Against this backdrop of escalating tensions and looming humanitarian crises, it behoves France, Britain and Germany to step up to the plate instead of wringing their hands in frustration. Trump's wilful exercise of presidential prerogative may have left the area's Kurds and Arabs with no option but to halt the offensive against Daesh and brace for new battles, displacement and ethnic cleansing. But the European powers can still take on a more assertive role both on the ground and in the diplomatic sphere to ensure that a fresh round of war in Syria is not inevitable.
- Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on Middle East