FOREIGN POLICY/MILITARY/SYRIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TURKEY: “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey lashed out on Monday [1-16-18] against a proposed American-trained force that would potentially position thousands of Kurdish militia fighters along Turkey’s southern border.
The allied military headquarters in Baghdad that is leading the fight against the Islamic State in Syria said Sunday that it had started recruiting and retraining members of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab militia to protect the borders of territory captured by the group. The militia, the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces or S.D.F., currently controls a large swath of northeastern Syria.
The Trump administration has said it would gradually scale back its military assistance to the Kurds as major combat winds down. The proposed border force appears to signal how the Pentagon would support its Kurdish proxies in the longer term in Syria. Over several years, the new border force could grow to 30,000 members, the headquarters said in an email.
American commanders consider the Kurdish fighters the most capable of the S.D.F., and of any future border-security force, but Turkey views the Syrian Kurds as terrorists. The new plan threatens to escalate tensions between the United States and Turkey — two NATO allies — that were papered over during the offensive last year to seize Raqqa, which had been the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital in Syria… The proposed border security force adds a new dimension to this highly combustible mixture, and drew sharp criticism from the Turkish government.”
-Eric Schmitt, “Turkey’s President Assails U.S.-Trained Kurdish Border Force,” The New York Times online, Jan. 15, 2018