Turkey seeks to clip wings of Kurds in Syria: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy analyst, about Turkey saying its troops will stay in Syria as long as there are “threats” against the Turkish state.

Here is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: Turkey is not backing down, it says its offensive will continue, how do you feel about that?

Jatras: Well let’s start with the basics. This is of course a violation of Syria’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and they are right to protest it. Of course this is not the first time, we even have American forces invaded with Kurdish troops in northern Syria that are certainly not there with any legal authorization.

The Turks have said that their target is Daesh but everybody knows the real target is the Kurds specifically that they do not extend their area of control west of the Euphrates River. The real question right now is how destabilizing this is going to be and that really depends on how open-ended the Turkish incursion is. If it is limited to blocking the Kurds west of the Euphrates and then they end it relatively soon, I do not think it is very much of a game changer here.

I think the important thing is this is not what previous Turkish threats to intervene in Syria have looked like as to find a pretext to overthrow the Assad government, to take its war against Syria directly. It does not appear that that is their goal right now.

Press TV: I have read a theory and you can correct me if this is incorrect but I have read a theory that this may very well be Turkey trying to bring about some sort of a buffer zone within Syria, something it has been calling for quite a long time. Do you think that that may be accurate?

Jatras: There is that theory, I am not sure it is accurate. I think right now what they are trying to do is clip the wings of the Kurds which of course puts the Americans in a very difficult position because Washington has supported the Kurdish forces very strongly and now we are acquiescing to be impounded by yet our other ally, our NATO ally, Turkey. So it further exposes the incoherence of American policy which we have already seen in the past for example between Kurdish fights with so-called Free Syrian Army units, one supported by the Pentagon, the other supported by the CIA.

So this really throws simply more of a monkey wrench into an already complex picture.

Press TV: And finally, many people have said that after the failed coup that Turkey was pivoting towards Russia for example, it seems its policies are a bit confused, aren’t they, because I would imagine that Russians are not happy about this incursion?

Jatras: I do not know that they are happy and I do not think the Iranians and certainly not the Syrians are happy but I think they also look at this with a measured response that if it is limited to the Turkish concerns about the Kurds, they will have to put that into the context of what progress can be made toward a wider settlement and that ultimately has to get back to the survival of the legitimate Syrian government which it seems that Turkey is no longer disputing and then coming together with some kind of political future for unified Syria.

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