What the Syria Hawks Refuse to Acknowledge

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria is controversial partly because of the possible consequences for the country’s Kurdish minority. “Among the biggest losers are likely to be the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped and relied on to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” The New York Times editorialized. “Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, considers many of the Kurds to be terrorists bent on destroying his country. In recent days he has vowed to launch a new offensive against them in the Syrian border region.”

A op-ed by Tommy Meyerson, a veteran of the Syria campaign, that “the Kurdish-led civil administration does the heavy lifting of guarding hundreds of ’ most dangerous foreign fighters,” asserts that the West “owes them a debt,” and warns that a Turkish invasion into territory they hold “would force Kurdish forces to pull back from the front lines against the remnant of , allowing the jihadists to regroup and proliferate.”