Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will attempt to lower the temperature on increasingly heated tensions between the United States and Turkey on Thursday, traveling to Ankara at a moment of clashing military strategies between the two NATO allies in neighboring Syria.
Regional analysts say Mr. Tillerson is unlikely to offer anything of substance to appease Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s outrage over Washington’s vow to continue backing Kurdish forces in Syria that Ankara claims are “terrorists.”
The spark for the sharp downturn in relations is Turkey’s 3-week-old military campaign against the U.S.-allied forces in the northern Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin, with Mr. Erdogan and his aides saying the Turkish army’s offensive will expand despite the presence of U.S. military special forces in their path.
U.S. officials say Mr. Tillerson’s stop in Turkey — part of a week-long trip that includes visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait — shows how “seriously” he takes the Erdogan government’s concerns. But analysts note the Trump administration still has not appointed an ambassador to Ankara and is showing no sign of yielding to Turkish demands relating to American backing of the Kurds. The Syrian Kurdish forces have proven a critical ally in the war against Islamic State militants who once held a broad swath of eastern Syria.
“The administration is pretty much holding the line that Turkey’s military intervention in Afrin is a distraction and that the U.S. is not going withdraw,” said Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
“The two sides are at a strategic impasse,” Mr. Stein said in an interview Wednesday. “They just do not agree on the way forward in Syria and, particularly since the fall of Raqqa, the Turks have decided to turn up the heat on the U.S., to make U.S. support for the Syrian Kurds as unpalatable as possible.”
“Tillerson’s visit will likely be cordial,” he added, “but I think he’ll leave with both sides disappointed.”
The Erdogan government is particularly angry over the U.S. military’s support for the so-called People’s Protection Units, a mainly Kurdish group known by the acronym YPG. While Washington has for years relied on the group as a go-to proxy ground force against Islamic State, Turkey sees the YPG as a terrorist organization with deep links to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been waging an often violent separatist battle with Ankara since the 1980s.
Turkey fears that gains made in recent years by Kurds in Syria have “undercut” past successes that the Turkish military has had against Kurdish separatists, Mr. Stein said. “The idea is that somehow Kurdish success in Syria could embolden Kurdish separatists inside Turkey,” he said. “That’s a real concern for the Erdogan government.”
The Erdogan government appears eager to stir up anti-American sentiment for domestic political reasons. Earlier this week, the mayor of Ankara said he was renaming the street where the U.S. Embassy “Olive Branch Street” — the code name Turkish forces are using for the Syrian incursion.
Despite Washington’s concerns, Mr. Erdogan himself has vowed to expand the operation even further into Syria toward the town of Manbij — and warning American troops stationed there not to get in the way.
With U.S. commanders signaling they have no plans to withdraw from Manbij, Mr. Erdogan told the Turkish parliament that American forces should prepare for an “Ottoman slap,” according to the Reuters news agency.
State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Nauert told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that “as funny as the comment was,” she has a policy of not responding to every quip by every foreign leader. But she acknowledged the Turkish campaign in Afrin “is one of the areas of deep, deep concern on the part of the [Trump] administration and the U.S. government.”
Mr. Tillerson, while calling the Afrin invasion a “distraction,” appeared eager to mend fences at a terrorism summit earlier this week in Kuwait, insisting that Washington was “keenly aware of the legitimate security concerns of Turkey, our coalition partner and NATO ally.”
“We will continue to be completely transparent with Turkey about our efforts in Syria to defeat ISIS, and we stand by our NATO ally in its counterterrorism efforts,” he said.
But Turkish officials do not appear to be mollified, at least in public.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Istanbul this week that U.S.-Turkish ties “are at a very critical point.”
“We will either fix these relations or they will break completely,” he said.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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