On October 9, 2019, after many false starts, Turkey finally drove into a small section of northeastern Syria in an attempt to establish a “safe zone” to end what it claimed to be an existential Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) threat to its territorial integrity. President Donald J. Trump’s decision to pull out some 1,000 U.S. troops acting as advisers, supporters and protectors of the PKK-affiliated Democratic Union Party/Peoples Defense Units/Syrian Democratic Forces (PYD/YPG/SDF), or simply the Syrian Kurds, triggered the Turkish incursion. Widespread condemnation of Turkey and Trump quickly ensued. Detractors argued that the United States had (1) dishonorably deserted its Syrian Kurdish ally, (2) alienated future allies who would no longer trust it, (3) allowed some of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) prisoners incarcerated by YPG guards to escape and potentially revive the genocidal jihadist organization, (4) rewarded Turkish aggression, (5) handed the murderous but exhausted Assad regime new life, (6) facilitated Iran’s drive to the Mediterranean and potential threat to Israel, and, maybe most of all, (7) empowered Russia as the ultimate arbitrator of the Syrian imbroglio, to the detriment of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The purpose of this article is to set the background to this problematic situation and analyze its immediate and long-term implications.

BACKGROUND

Although Syria is an ancient land, the modern state only dates from the borders fashioned by the secretive British-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the subsequent French mandate of the League of Nations established in 1920. Before that, the Kurds of modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Syria had all simply lived in the Ottoman Empire. The concept of the Kurds in Syria could only become meaningful after the French mandate had been created and, even later, after failed Kurdish uprisings during the 1920s in Turkey had forced many Kurds to leave for Syria. Even today, many Kurds in Turkey and Syria do not refer to themselves as coming from those states, but rather as belonging to either above or below the line (border). Developments in Turkey have always had a profound influence on the Kurdish situation in Syria. This continues today.

Slightly more than 2.2 million Kurds, approximately 10 percent of the Syrian population, may live in Syria,¹ a much smaller number than live in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Although the largest ethnic minority in Syria, the Kurds live in three noncontiguous areas and, until the Syrian civil war began on March 11, 2011, were much less well-organized than in the other three states. For many years, the repressive government of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar also sought to maintain an Arab belt between Syria’s Kurds and those in Turkey and Iraq. This Arab belt artificially separated ethnic kin and in many cases actual blood relatives across the border and uprooted them.