The New Yorker:

At 3 A.M. on Monday, Middle East time, the commander of American special forces in Syria—whose name is not public for security reasons—held a video teleconference with General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the Kurdish militia commander who led the war against ISIS on behalf of the U.S. coalition. The commander had bad news. President Trump had decided—after a telephone call with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—that the United States would stand aside if Turkey, as announced, soon invades northeast Syria. U.S. troops positioned in two key posts in Syria on the border with Turkey would immediately be withdrawn. Mazloum and his Syrian Democratic Forces, who lost some eleven thousand fighters in the grinding five-year war against ISIS, were on their own.

Mazloum recounted the conversation to me a few hours later. “The implications are catastrophic,” he said. “We told the Americans we would prepare for war. The Kurds will defend themselves. There is no place for us to go. So that means a war between the Kurds and Turkey. The Arabs also won’t accept a Turkish invasion, either.” The S.D.F., created under U.S. tutelage, includes both Kurds and Arabs.

There is also the problem, Mazloum noted, of the twelve thousand ISIS fighters captured by the S.D.F. “This decision increases the hopes within ISIS of rebooting the caliphate,” he said. “The prisoners in detention centers have good morale now. They hope that they are able to escape.” The S.D.F., which is not a state and gets little foreign assistance, has struggled to cope with the dregs of ISIS since the caliphate fell, in March. Eighty thousand ISIS family members, held separately in the al-Hawl detention center, have become more aggressive since Turkey signalled its intent to invade northern Syria, the general claimed. Al-Hawl has become a mini-caliphate, run largely by women shrouded in black niqab robes and veils.

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