​East of Euphrates: Is it settled now?

TURKEY - In Brief 08 Aug 2019 by Atilla Yesilada

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It has long been one of my most tiring mottos that “Turkey can’t pull out of Syria”, because surrendering the neighbor to Assad and PKK-affiliated Kurdish entity YPG-PYD would earnestly create problems of survival in the long run. At the very least, the nearly 4 million strong Syrian refugee population in Turkey has become a focus of hatred, mostly for poor AKP voters, who have to compete for scarce welfare services with them. Soon as the dust settled on Erdogan’s humiliating double-defeat over Istanbul municipality, our feisty president went into action to address the problem, ordering the governor of Istanbul to deport undocumented Syrians, as well as proclaiming that a military campaign “East of Euphrates” (Turkish short-hand for North East Syria, currently under control of SDF, a multi-ethnic umbrella organization under the sway of YPG-PYD) was imminent. This threat caused a rapid response in the USA, which has long resisted Turkish demands to set up a safe or no-man’s land 20 miles deep at the Turkish-Syrian border East of Euphrates to prevent PKK incursions into Turkey. At the same time new Secretary of Defense Mr. Mark Esper called a Turkish military campaign “unacceptable”, immediately dispatching a military delegation to Ankara to sort out the differences. After three days of contentious negotiations a compromise seems to have been reached, though it is not clear whether this is a temporary solution. To explain the compromise I directly quote from Turkish daily Hurriyet: “Turkish and U.S. military officials have agreed that the safe-zone in northern Syria will be a "peace corridor" for displaced Syrians longing to return home, the Turkish National Defense Mini...