Perspective: Syria withdrawalWill Abandoning the Kurds Result in the Mass Release of Islamic State Fighters?

In a series of tweets Monday morning, President Donald Trump, following a phone call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, announced the United States would withdraw its remaining forces from northern Syria, and that he had given a green light to Turkey to enter Syria to deal with Kurdish forces there. These forces had been instrumental in helping the United States defeat the Islamist State in Syria, and are now holding about 11,000 ISIS fighters – about 2,000 of them foreign fighters – in thirty detention centers. The Kurdish forces are regarded as terrorists by Turkey.

Trump wanted to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria earlier this year, but was persuaded not to do so. Many of those who had argued that the continuing U.S. presence in Syria was essential not only to prevent the resurgence of the Islamist State, but also to counter the growing influence of Iran and Russia in the region, and for reassuring allies – the Kurds, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan – of U.S. commitment to their protection, have left the administration. The most prominent advocates of continuing U.S. presence in Syria were John Bolton, James Mattis, and Dan Coats.

Robert Chesney writes in Lawfare that the Kurdish partners of the U.S.-led coalition (particularly the SDF, the Syrian Kurds’ military arm) have been the primary foot soldiers of U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. He notes that the Kurdish forces “have played an especially critical role more recently by providing the only current solution to the problem of what to do with thousands of captured Islamic State fighters—many thousands of them from Syria and Iraq, and more than two thousand “foreign fighters” whose home countries (particularly European ones) have proven almost entirely unwilling to allow repatriation.  

Chesney writes:

Many of us have long warned that this detention status quo was not sustainable over the long haul, because of the risk that SDF forces at some point might not be able to continue to hold the requisite territory or because they might for some reason cease to be willing to administer this detention system themselves. Now it seems that both triggering conditions for a collapse of the SDF detention system are looming before us, thanks to President Trump’s precipitous decision to green light a Turkish invasion of northern Syria.

The White House statement [which was issued following Trump’s tweets] shows awareness of the detention concern, but treats it in a way that is far more alarming than comforting.  Consider:

* As an initial matter, the United States does not hold the detainees, though the statement is written in a way that implies otherwise. It is the Kurds who hold them. Omitting this helps to elide the fact that exposing U.S. erstwhile coalition partners to Turkish attack may well  directly cause the release of detainees.

* The statement refers to the subset of detainees who are foreign fighters, hinting that European states and others might swoop in at the last minute to take them all back, solving that part of the problem.  There is little reason to believe these states will do so now, however. And in any event, a much larger number of Islamic State fighters in Kurdish custody are Syrian or Iraqi. 

* The statement says that Turkey will have to be responsible for the detainees now. Note that this is an implicit acknowledgement that the president’s decision to abandon the Kurds likely will result in the end of Kurdish detention operations. But never mind that. The critical point is that there is no reason whatsoever to think that there will be an actual handoff of detainees from Kurdish to Turkish control—quite the opposite, in fact. Nor is there reason to believe that the Turks will attempt to swoop in to ensure continued detention of Islamic State fighters if and when the Kurds feel obliged to abandon detention operations, let alone that Turkey could do so effectively.

Chesney concludes:

It is possible that all this hand-wringing will prove unwarranted. Perhaps Turkey’s military incursion will be limited, leaving the Kurds capable and willing to continue detaining Islamic State fighters. Perhaps vast numbers of the detainees will be dispatched to Iraq for prosecution after all (a much-touted plan a year ago, about which little has surfaced since). Perhaps Turkey will somehow gain control of and maintain detention operations. Anything is possible. But none of that seems likely. More likely, the biggest beneficiary of all this will be the Islamic State.