Trump’s abandonment of Kurds will change balance of power in Middle East – to America’s ultimate loss

Syrian government, Russia and Iran appear to be main winners, writes Patrick Cockburn

A US soldier on an armoured vehicle in Syria's Hasakeh province close to the Turkish border (AFP)

It is the endgame of the eight-year-old Syrian war: the Turkish-Kurd confrontation was the most serious crisis still to be resolved, something that is now happening in the cruellest way possible with the extinction of the statelet that the Syrian Kurds had fought to create since 2011.

The Turkish priority, which was to destroy anything even resembling self-determination for the 2-3 million Syrian Kurds, has been achieved. The Kurds have no option but to throw themselves into the embrace of President Bashar al-Assad to protect themselves from a Turkish advance that is likely to mean ethnic cleansing for Kurds and has already created 130,000 displaced people.

What is doubly sad about this is that Rojava, as the Kurds called their mini-state, was the only part of Syria in which the outcome of the 2011 uprising had produced an improved life for many people – particularly if you were a Kurd or a woman. In every other part of Syria, Mr Assad’s government and his opponents seemed to vie with each other in their violence and corruption.

Syrian army troops are racing to take up positions in Kurdish-controlled cities, towns and villages before the Turkish army and its allied Arab militiamen can reach them. The idea is that Syrian soldiers will provide a cordon sanitaire to stop the Turkish advance.

This would save Kobane, the Kurdish city that Isis besieged and almost captured in 2014-15, at the western end of Rojava and Qamishli, the de facto Kurdish capital, 320 km (200 miles) to the east.

Syrian troops are establishing a presence in Hasakah, which Isis fought hard to capture, north of the oilfields that will now presumably come under Mr Assad’s control once again.

Kurdish leaders say that their agreement with Damascus is only military and they will still have political control, but there is no doubt that the balance of power has swayed significantly and irrevocably towards the central government in Damascus.

The Kurdish authorities will remain a strong force where they are the majority, but not in the middle Euphrates Valley where they held Sunni Arab cities like Raqqa and Manbij. The Kurds could never have permanently held these areas where they were never accepted by the Arabs – the dislike was mutual.

“They have always been fascists around here,” volunteered a Kurd to me as we drove into Raqqa last year. The Kurds have lost much but not everything: they still have a powerful army of 25,000 experienced YPG fighters that now presumably shift to the government side. Mr Assad will have to pay some attention to what the Kurds want in terms of autonomy.

It is the Kurds who will pay the greatest price for President Trump’s decision two weeks ago to publicly abandon his YPG allies – who lost 11,000 soldiers fighting Isis. But there is also a heavy cost to the US in terms of loss of trust on the part of others who have hitherto relied on Washington to support them. After seeing what happened to the Syrian Kurds, pro-American leaders around the world will wonder if the same thing might happen to them. Unsurprisingly, President Putin is currently receiving a particularly warm welcome on an official visit to Saudi Arabia.

The discrediting of the US as a leader and an ally will have an immediate impact in the Middle East. President Trump was seeking to create a coalition to confront and exert “maximum pressure” on Iran, which he had accused of trying to spread its malign influence throughout the region.

But the total failure of the US in Syria and the swift and frivolous abandonment of the Kurds makes the Iranians look like reliable friends and determined enemies by comparison. Washington was never going to have a success in Syria, but Mr Trump’s humiliating scuttle maximises the damage to US credibility.

And Russia will be a primary beneficiary of the latest events. It stuck by Mr Assad since 2011, became his active military ally in 2015, and, instead of being sucked into the Syrian swamp as many had predicted, emerges on the winning side. This is the greatest Russian political and military success since before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and goes far to re-establish Moscow as a superpower.

Russia is now seeking to re-establish Mr Assad’s authority over most of northeast Syria, while not offending its ally Turkey, close cooperation with which is one of Russia’s gains from the Syrian war. It will most likely succeed: Turkey does not have the military forces to push far into the vast plains of this part of Syria. It has had a big success since its invasion started last week in bringing an end to Rojava, the Kurdish statelet.

Anything more would be complicated and bring diminishing returns. There are flashpoints – like who will control the Syrian Arab city of Manbij, which has been a vital link between Mr Assad’s territory and the Kurdish held zone – but Turkey would be overplaying its hand to try to fight the Syrian government as well as the Kurds.

Another one of Syria’s multiple civil wars has yet to play out: this is the fate of Idlib and the surrounding land, the last bastion of the Syrian armed opposition, where three million people are trapped and are under Syrian government and Russian air and artillery attack. Turkey looks increasingly acquiescent in the gradual extinction of this enclave, so long as its population does not flee across the Turkish border and become refugees in Turkey.

The Syrian government, Russia and Iran are the main winners and the US and its allies the main losers. Among the latter are Saudi Arabia and the Sunni oil states of the Gulf that played a central role in the Syrian crisis between 2011 and 2015. They were committed to getting rid of Mr Assad and rolling back Iranian influence and failed in both attempts.

Syrian Arab civilians flee as Turkish troops with American-made M60 tanks and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters gather near the village of Qirata on the outskirts of the northern city of Manbij near the Turkish border on Monday (AFP via Getty Images)

Saudi Arabia’s influence in the region is bound to decline because of this indirect failure in Syria, but also because of its lack of success in Yemen and its vulnerability to Iranian-inspired pinprick attacks like the drone assault on its oil facilities on 14 September.

Much attention is being given to the possible rebirth of Isis and, certainly, the collapse of the US-YPG alliance is good news for its surviving fighters. These will be reinforced by thousands of escaping prisoners and no doubt Isis will have something of a resurgence, but the Sunni Arab communities on which it relies in Syria and Iraq have taken a terrible battering since 2014. They will not want to fight a new war, though Isis will benefit from chaos and, presumably, an end to US airstrikes.

Syria became the arena in which conflicts that have little to do with Syria were fought out. In terms of world politics, President Trump has ensured that the US is emerging as the great loser, not least because his erratic tweets over the last two weeks – accusing the Kurds of not taking part in the Normandy landings and other weird allegations – look ever more demented and self-destructive.