It looks like we're abandoning the Kurds again.

[solderguy]

This is not our fight. We cannot send troops to every corner of the world to fight in wars in which we have no national interest and that we don't intend to win. By pulling us out of these quagmires President Trump is demonstrating unmatched wisdom, at least when compared to his predecessors who got us into these messes.

The 1800 troops about to sent to Saudi Arabia say Hi.
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/10/11...a-troops-esper

[Hoppalong]

The 1800 troops about to sent to Saudi Arabia say Hi.
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/10/11...a-troops-esper

The there is even more troops going over.128th Infantry hones skills, integrates with partner brigade en-route to Afghanistan



And here is 400 going to Afghanistan They say Hi as well. LOL

FORT POLK, La. (NEWS RELEASE)-- The nearly 400 Red Arrow Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 128th Infantry have fully integrated into their role as “guardian angels” for the Army’s 3rd Security Force Assistance Brigade — or SFAB — during their train-up prior to deploying to Afghanistan.The 128th mobilized in mid-July before heading to Fort Hood, Texas, where they began an intensive training regimen that culminated with the battalion’s recent rotation through the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk.
The training at Fort Hood and JRTC was preceded by months of training in Wisconsin in preparation for their deployment. As guardian angels, the unit will provide force protection for engagements between advisors from the SFAB, other coalition forces, and Afghan troops.

https://www.weau.com/content/news/12...560885511.html

[The Cub]

Turkey and the Kurds: It’s More Complicated Than You Think

By Andrew C. McCarthy

October 10, 2019 12:36 PM



U.S. Army soldiers walk during a joint U.S.-Turkey patrol near Tel Abyad, Syria, September 8, 2019. (Rodi Said/Reuters) We are grateful for the Kurds’ help, and we should try to help them in return. But no one wants to risk war with Turkey. On Monday, President Trump announced that a contingent of fewer than 100 U.S. troops in Syria was being moved away from Kurdish-held territory on the border of Turkey. The move effectively green-lighted military operations by Turkey against the Kurds, which have now commenced.

Some U.S. military officials went public with complaints about being “blindsided.” The policy cannot have been a surprise, though. The president has made no secret that he wants out of Syria, where we now have about 1,000 troops (down from over 2,000 last year). More broadly, he wants our forces out of the Middle East. He ran on that position. I’ve argued against his “endless wars” tropes, but his stance is popular. As for Syria specifically, many of the president’s advisers think we should stay, but he has not been persuaded.

The president’s announcement of the redeployment of the troops in Syria came on the heels of a phone conversation with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This, obviously, was a mistake, giving the appearance (and not for the first time) that Trump is taking cues from Ankara’s Islamist strongman. As has become rote, the inevitable criticism was followed by head-scratching tweets: The president vows to “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey,” which “I’ve done before” (huh?), if Turkey takes any actions “that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” We can only sigh and say it will be interesting to see how the president backs up these haughty threats now that Erdogan has begun his invasion.

All that said, the president at least has a cogent position that is consistent with the Constitution and public opinion. He wants U.S. forces out of a conflict in which America’s interests have never been clear, and for which Congress has never approved military intervention. I find that sensible — no surprise, given that I have opposed intervention in Syria from the start (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The stridency of the counterarguments is matched only by their selectiveness in reciting relevant facts.

I thus respectfully dissent from our National Review editorial.

President Trump, it says, is “making a serious mistake” by moving our forces away from what is described as “Kurdish territory”; the resulting invasion by superior Turkish forces will “kill American allies” while “carving out a zone of dominance” that will serve further to “inflame and complicate” the region.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the basic fact that there is no Kurdish territory. There is Syrian territory on Turkey’s border that the Kurds are occupying — a situation that itself serves to “inflame and complicate” the region for reasons I shall come to. Ethnic Kurds do not have a state. They live in contiguous parts of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Most are integrated into these countries, but many are separatists.
The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help. They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots. Although such informed observers as Michael Rubin contend that the PKK has “evolved,” it remains a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. While our government materially supports the PKK’s confederates, ordinary Americans have been prosecuted for materially supporting the PKK.

The PKK has a long history of conducting terrorist attacks, but their quarrel is not with us. So why has our government designated them as terrorists? Because they have been fighting an insurgent war against Turkey for over 30 years. Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them — as I’ve detailed over the years (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and in my 2012 book, Spring Fever). The Erdogan problem complicates but does not change the fact that Turkey is of great strategic significance to our security.

While it is a longer discussion, I would be open to considering the removal of both the PKK from the terrorist list and Turkey from NATO. For now, though, the blunt facts are that the PKK is a terrorist organization and Turkey is our ally. These are not mere technicalities. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, our government’s machinations in Syria have not put just one of our allies in a bind. There are two allies in this equation, and our support for one has already vexed the other. The ramifications are serious, not least Turkey’s continued lurch away from NATO and toward Moscow.

Without any public debate, the Obama administration in 2014 insinuated our nation into the Kurdish–Turk conflict by arming the YPG. To be sure, our intentions were good. ISIS had besieged the city of Kobani in northern Syria; but Turkey understandably regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, complicit in the PKK insurgency.

That brings us to another non-technicality that the editors mention only in passing: Our intervention in Syria has never been authorized by Congress. Those of us who opposed intervention maintained that congressional authorization was necessary because there was no imminent threat to our nation. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, having U.S. forces “deter further genocidal bloodshed in northern Syria” is not a mission for which Americans support committing our men and women in uniform. Such bloodlettings are the Muslim Middle East’s default condition, so the missions would never end.

A congressional debate should have been mandatory before we jumped into a multi-layered war, featuring anti-American actors and shifting loyalties on both sides. In fact, so complex is the situation that President Obama’s initial goal was to oust Syria’s Assad regime; only later came the pivot to fighting terrorists, which helped Assad. That is Syria: Opposing one set of America’s enemies only empowers another. More clear than what intervention would accomplish was the likelihood of becoming enmeshed, inadvertently or otherwise, in vicious conflicts of which we wanted no part — such as the notorious and longstanding conflict between Turks and Kurds.

Barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) come into existence because of Islamic fundamentalism. But saying so remains de trop in Washington. Instead, we tell ourselves that terrorism emerges due to “vacuums” created in the absence of U.S. forces. On this logic, there should always and forever be U.S. forces and involvement in places where hostility to America vastly outweighs American interests.

President Obama has wrongly been blamed for “creating” ISIS by leaving a vacuum in Iraq. Couldn’t be the sharia-supremacist culture, could it? No, we’re supposed to suppose that this sort of thing could happen anywhere. So, when Obama withdrew our forces from the region (as Trump is doing now), jihadist atrocities and territorial conquests ensued. Eventually, Obama decided that action needed to be taken. But invading with U.S. troops was not an option — it would have been deeply unpopular and undercut Obama’s tout that Islamic militarism was on the wane. Our government therefore sought proxy forces.

Most proved incompetent. The Kurds, however, are very capable. There was clamor on Capitol Hill to back them. We knew from the first, though, that supporting them was a time bomb. Turkey was never going to countenance a Kurdish autonomous zone, led by the YPG and PKK elements, on its Syrian border. Ankara was already adamant that the PKK was using the Kurdish autonomous zone in Iraq to encourage separatist uprisings in Turkey, where 20 percent of the population is Kurdish. Erdogan would never accept a similar arrangement in Syria; he would evict the YPG forcibly if it came to that.

Yes, we had humanitarian reasons for arming the Kurds. But doing so undermined our anti-terrorism laws while giving Erdogan incentive to align with Russia and mend fences with Iran. ISIS, meanwhile, has never been defeated — it lost its territorial “caliphate,” but it was always more lethal as an underground terrorist organization than as a quasi-sovereign struggling to hold territory. And al-Qaeda, though rarely spoken of in recent years, is ascendant — as threatening as it has been at any time since its pre-9/11 heyday.

Those of us opposed to intervention in Syria wanted Congress to think through these quite predictable outcomes before authorizing any further U.S. military involvement in this wretched region. Congress, however, much prefers to lay low in the tall grass, wait for presidents to act, and then complain when things go awry.

And so they have: The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)

It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria.” That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep U.S. forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.

230
President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. I hope he is up to it. For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.

Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS. We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out. Of course we must prioritize the denial of safe havens from which jihadists can attack American interests. We have to stop pretending, though, that if our intentions toward this neighborhood are pure, its brutal history, enduring hostilities, and significant downside risks can be ignored.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/...han-you-think/

[Green Man]

I don't see the strategic value to the president blindsiding the pentagon re their relationship with our allies, or now former allies.

[KingsX]

Syrian Christians Proclaim "Trump is right on Syria!"
YPG Kurds are responsible for escalation in Northeast Syria




09 October 2019

"President Trump is right on Syria!," according to Johny Messo, the President of the World Council of Arameans (Syriacs) ("WCA"). Withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and halting financial and arms support to the YPG Kurds may help restore peace and security in Syria. Messo further argues that "the YPG Kurds are responsible for the current escalation in the northeast and that they hold the key for peace in this part of our ancestral homeland."

1) President Trump made the right decision in withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria to end the "ridiculous endless wars," fulfilling yet another campaign promise; he already ended the covert CIA program of 2013 to arm the "rebels" in Syria. America's mission to destroy the Caliphate and military power of ISIS was achieved in March 2019. So there was no cogent reason to stay in Syria, let alone to keep arming the YPG Kurds. Staying rather than leaving would be a greater security threat and burden for America.

more at link

https://www.wca-ngo.org/wca-news/pre...rump-ypg-syria

[The Cub]

I don't see the strategic value to the president blindsiding the pentagon re their relationship with our allies, or now former allies.

You mean like with the overwhelmingly successful "Arab Spring"?


.

The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help. They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots. Although such informed observers as Michael Rubin contend that the PKK has “evolved,” it remains a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. While our government materially supports the PKK’s confederates, ordinary Americans have been prosecuted for materially supporting the PKK.

The PKK has a long history of conducting terrorist attacks, but their quarrel is not with us. So why has our government designated them as terrorists? Because they have been fighting an insurgent war against Turkey for over 30 years. Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them — as I’ve detailed over the years (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and in my 2012 book, Spring Fever). The Erdogan problem complicates but does not change the fact that Turkey is of great strategic significance to our security.

[jimmyb]

It shouldn't take much intelligence to see that Trump totally blew this one and turned a Dictator loose all by himself..

[Off-Grid Organics]

Its clear the propogandist elite/globalist are running full tilt.

Oh indeed...look how ABC news just got BUSTED: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitic...dish-civilians

[Green Man]

Pullback Leaves Green Berets Feeling ‘Ashamed,’ and Kurdish Allies Describing ‘Betrayal’

By Eric Schmitt, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Ben Hubbard and Helene Cooper

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/w...key-trump.html

• Published Oct. 13, 2019Updated Oct. 14, 2019WASHINGTON — American commandos were working alongside Kurdish forces at an outpost in eastern Syria last year when they were attacked by columns of Syrian government tanks and hundreds of troops, including Russian mercenaries. In the next hours, the Americans threw the Pentagon’s arsenal at them, including B-52 strategic bombers. The attack was stopped.

• 
  

That operation, in the middle of the American-led campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, showed the extent to which the United States military was willing to protect the Syrian Kurds, its main ally on the ground.

But now, with the White House revoking protection for these Kurdish fighters, some of the Special Forces officers who battled alongside the Kurds say they feel deep remorse at orders to abandon their allies.

“They trusted us and we broke that trust,” one Army officer who has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria said last week in a telephone interview. “It’s a stain on the American conscience.”

“I’m ashamed,” said another officer who had also served in northern Syria. Both officers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from their chains of command.

And the response from the Kurds themselves was just as stark. “The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the trench is betrayal,” said Shervan Darwish, an official allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The next flurry of orders from Washington, as some troops had feared, will pull American troops out of northern Syria altogether. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Sunday that President Trump had ordered the roughly 1,000 American troops in the country’s northeast to conduct a “deliberate withdrawal” out of the country in the coming days and weeks.

The defense secretary’s statement came after comments on Friday pushing back on complaints that the United States was betraying allies in Syria — “We have not abandoned the Kurds” — even as he acknowledged that his Turkish counterpart had ignored his plea to stop the offensive.

Army Special Forces soldiers — mostly members of the Third Special Forces Group — moved last week to consolidate their positions in the confines of their outposts miles away from the Syrian border, a quiet withdrawal that all but confirmed the United States’ capitulation to the Turkish military’s offensive to clear Kurdish-held areas of northern Syria.

But as the Americans pulled back, the Kurds moved north to try to reinforce their comrades fighting the offensive. The American soldiers could only watch from their sandbag-lined walls. Orders from Washington were simple: Hands off. Let the Kurds fight for themselves.

The orders contradicted the American military’s strategy in Syria over the past four years, especially when it came to the Kurdish fighters, known as the Y.P.G., who were integral to routing the Islamic State from northeastern Syria. The Kurds had fought in Manbij, Raqqa and deep into the Euphrates River Valley, hunting the last Islamic State fighters in the group’s now-defunct physical caliphate. But the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., as the Kurdish and their allied Arab fighters on the ground are called, are being left behind.

American Special Forces and other troops had built close ties with their Kurdish allies, living on the same dusty compounds, sharing meals and common dangers. They fought side by side, and helped evacuate Kurdish dead and wounded from the battlefield.

“When they mourn, we mourn with them,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a former head of the military’s Central Command, said on Thursday at the Middle East Institute.

The Kurdish forces and American military have survived previous strains, including Mr. Trump’s sudden decision in December to withdraw all American troops from northern Syria, a decision that was later walked back somewhat.

This time may be different, and irreversible. “It would seem at this particular point, we’ve made it very, very hard for them to have a partnership relationship with us because of this recent policy decision,” General Votel said.

As part of security measures the United States brokered to tamp down tensions with Turkish troops, Kurdish forces agreed to pull back from the border, destroy fortifications and return some heavy weapons — steps meant to show that they posed no threat to Turkish territory, but that later made them more vulnerable when Turkey launched its offensive.


Special Forces officers described another recent operation with Kurds that underscored the tenacity of the group. The Americans and the Kurdish troops were searching for a low-level Islamic State leader in northern Syria. It was a difficult mission and unlikely they would find the commander.

From his operations center, one American officer watched the Kurds work alongside the Americans on the ground in an almost indistinguishable symmetry. They captured the Islamic State fighter.

“The S.D.F.’s elite counterterrorism units are hardened veterans of the war against ISIS whom the U.S. has seen in action and trust completely,” said Nicholas A. Heras, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who visited the S.D.F. in July to advise them on the Islamic State, or ISIS.



A cemetery for Kurdish troops who fought against the Islamic State in Kobani, Syria. “When they mourn, we mourn with them,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a former head of the military’s Central Command.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

During the battle against ISIS, coordination between the United States military and the Syrian Democratic Forces has extended from the highest levels to rank-and-file fighters, according to multiple interviews with S.D.F. fighters and commanders in Syria over the course of the campaign.

S.D.F. commanders worked side by side with American military officers in a joint command center in a defunct cement factory near the northern Syrian town of Kobani, where they discussed strategy and planned future operations.


The battle of Kobani that began in 2014 gave birth to the United States’ ties to the Kurds in northeastern Syria. ISIS fighters, armed with heavy American-made artillery captured from retreating Iraqi army units, surrounded Kobani, a Kurdish city, and entered parts of it.


Despite the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to offer help, the United States carried out airstrikes against advancing ISIS militants, and its military aircraft dropped ammunition, small arms and medical supplies to replenish the Kurdish combatants.

That aid helped turn the tide, the Kurds defeated ISIS, and American commanders realized they had discovered a valuable ally in the fight against the terrorist group.

Thousands of S.D.F. fighters received training from the United States in battlefield tactics, reconnaissance and first aid. Reconnaissance teams learned to identify Islamic State locations and transmit them to the command center for the American-led military coalition to plan airstrikes.

Visitors to front-line S.D.F. positions often saw Syrian officers with iPads and laptops they used to communicate information to their American colleagues.

“For the last two years, the coordination was pretty deep,” said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Washington-based Kurdish affairs analyst who has spent time in northeastern Syria. “The mutual trust was very high, the mutual confidence, because this collaboration brought enormous results.”



“They completed each other,” he said of the S.D.F. and United States-led coalition. “The coalition didn’t have boots on the ground and fighters didn’t have air support, so they needed each other.”



Smoke rising from the Syrian town of Tel Abyad after the Turkish military invaded last week.CreditBulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That coordination was critical in many of the big battles against the Islamic State.
To open the battle in one town, S.D.F. fighters were deposited by coalition aircraft behind the Islamic State’s lines. At the start of another battle, United States Special Operations forces helped the S.D.F. plot and execute an attack across the Euphrates River.

Even after the Islamic State had lost most of its territory, the United States trained counterterrorism units to do tactical raids on ISIS hide-outs and provided them with intelligence needed to plan them.

Even in territory far from the front lines with the Islamic State, S.D.F. vehicles often drove before and after American convoys through Syrian towns and S.D.F. fighters provided perimeter security at facilities where United States personnel were based.

The torturous part of America’s on-again, off-again alliance with the Kurds — one in which the United States has routinely armed the Kurds to fight various regimes it viewed as adversaries — emerged in 1974, as the Kurds were rebelling against Iraq. Iran and the United States were allies, and the shah of Iran and Henry A. Kissinger encouraged the Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi government. C.I.A. agents were sent to the Iraq-Iran border to help the Kurds.

The Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani did not trust the shah of Iran but believed Kissinger when he said that the Kurds would receive help from the Americans.



But a year later, the shah of Iran made a deal with Saddam Hussein on the sidelines of an OPEC meeting: In return for some territorial adjustments along the Iran-Iraq border, the shah agreed to stop support for the Kurds.

Kissinger signed off on the plan, the Iraqi military slaughtered thousands of Kurds and the United States stood by. When questioned, Kissinger delivered his now famous explanation: “Covert action,” he said, “should not be confused with missionary work.”

In the fight against ISIS in Syria, Kurdish fighters followed their hard-fought triumph in Kobani by liberating other Kurdish towns. Then the Americans asked their newfound Kurdish allies to go into Arab areas, team up with local militias and reclaim those areas from the Islamic State.

The American military implored the S.D.F. to fight in the Arab areas, and so they advanced, seizing Raqqa and Deir al-Zour, winning but suffering large numbers of casualties.

The American-Kurdish military alliance against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq “began with us helping them,” said Peter W. Galbraith, the former American diplomat who has for years also been a senior adviser to the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. “But by the end, it was them helping us. They are the ones who recovered the territory that ISIS had taken.”

[Lenno]

Quoting the NY Times again? You have no shame!
Trump’s Syrian Maneuver Works – President Erdogan Asks for Negotiations With Kurds in Syria…

Posted on October 14, 2019 by sundance
President Trump has played this out perfectly. By isolating Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and effectively leaving him naked to an alliance of his enemies, Erdogan is now urgently asking for the U.S. to mediate peace negotiations with Kurdish forces.
This request happens immediately after President Trump signed an executive order [See Here] triggering the sanction authority of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Erdogan called the White House requesting an urgent phone call with President Trump.
After President Trump talked to Kurdish General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, President Trump then discussed the options available to President Erdogan. As a result of that conversation, Erdogan requested the U.S. mediate negotiations. Vice-President Mike Pence announces he will be traveling to the region with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien to lead that effort. WATCH: