Hassan Hassan writes:

Future historians might remember Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria, launched last week, as the second time that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan provided Islamic State with a lifeline, intentionally or not. The first was when Turkey opened its borders to foreign jihadists entering Syria, which ultimately enabled Isis to build a caliphate the size of Britain in 2014.

Both the time and manner of the intervention risk unravelling the situation in Syria beyond the buffer zone that Turkey intends to establish in the north-east. It will take the pressure off extremist forces and disturb a delicate equilibrium and the relative quiet that have existed in the country for about two years.

The move comes at a critical time in the fight against Isis, merely seven months after the collapse of the caliphate and while stabilisation and recovery are still in their early stages. In recent months, the US has stepped up efforts to improve local forces’ capabilities in detecting and removing sleeper cells linked to Isis and, under these circumstances, the group seemed to have been struggling to mount a large-scale insurgency.

President Donald Trump’s decision – allowing Ankara to invade areas previously protected by the US and controlled by a Kurdish-dominated coalition known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – took almost everyone involved in the Syrian conflict by surprise; the Wall Street Journal reported that a commander of the Kurdish force that spearheaded the fight against Isis stormed out of a meeting with the Americans after declaring: “You sold us!”

The Kurdish-dominated local forces still needed to learn how to deal with an underground insurgency that Isis and its previous incarnations so perfected in the years after the US invasion of Iraq. The counter-insurgency efforts proved different from and, at times, more challenging than the street-to-street fighting that the SDF conducted over the past five years. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports:

Hundreds of relatives of Islamic State fighters fled a Kurdish-run detention camp on Sunday morning after Turkish airstrikes hit the surrounding area, deepening the crisis prompted by the Turkish-led invasion of northern Syria.

The escapes came hours before the United States military said it would withdraw its remaining troops from northern Syria in the coming weeks, despite a likely resurgence of the Islamic State amid chaotic efforts by Turkish-led troops to wrest the region from Kurdish control.

A Kurdish official also said that the flag of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, had been raised in the countryside between the camp in the Kurdish-held town of Ain Issa and the Turkish border, another indication of how the Kurdish authorities were losing control of a region they had freed from the extremists only months ago. [Continue reading…]