The Syria Safe Zone Will Cripple the Kurds

Dakota Wood, James Phillips

Security, Middle East

The survival of the Syrian Kurds is at stake amid a U.S.-Turkey plan to create a safe zone along the country's border.

The State Department announced early this month that U.S. and Turkish military delegations had reached an agreement on establishing a safe area in northern Syria for refugees fleeing the fighting that has devastated that country since 2011. 

One major problem with this agreement is that the proposed zone would be detached from territory now controlled by Syria’s Kurdish militias, which have been operating under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Washington sees the Kurdish militias as key allies against ISIS, but Ankara regards them as enablers of the Turkish Kurd separatists that have been battling with Turkey since the 1980s.

The announcement omitted any meaningful details, such as key parameters for the zone or who will be in charge of actually maintaining security within the area. Perhaps that should not be too surprising. After all, the problem the agreement seeks to resolve is excruciatingly complex and impervious to easy answers or quick solutions.

Upwards of four million Syrian refugees have flooded into Turkey. Turkey wants to establish a safe area so it can start to relocate refugees, easing the strain it has put on Turkey’s domestic resources, not to mention the political problems it would rather not have. But in Turkey’s calculations, the safe zone doubles as an opportunity to push the Syrian Kurds farther away from Turkey’s border, thus making it harder for some monolithic Kurdish entity to assert itself in claiming Turkey’s eastern lands. So the agreement represents a potential double-win for Turkey, but at the expense of the Kurds.