A US-Turkey Sponsored “Islamic State Free Zone” within Syria
An article in the New York Times was
published recently discussing that the US and Turkey had agreed to
create a ‘safe zone’ in Syria. Specifically the article stated that the
plan was to have “an Islamic State-free zone controlled by relatively
moderate Syrian insurgents, which the Turks say could also be a ‘safe
zone’ for displaced Syrians.”
Now, ignoring the fact that this is obviously a massive infringement
upon the sovereignty of the Syrian state, there are some problems with
this, as well as larger implications.
For starters, Turkey has actively been aiding ISIS. In November 2014, Newsweek ran an interview with
a former ISIS member in which he stated that he “travelled in a convoy
of trucks as part of an ISIS unit from their stronghold in Raqqa, across
Turkish border, through Turkey and then back across the border to
attack Syrian Kurds in the city of Serekaniye in northern Syria in
February” and that commanders told him and other fighters that they
nothing to fear “because there was full cooperation with the Turks.” The
very next month,Claudia Roth, then-deputy speaker of the German Parliament, noted that the Turkish government was aiding ISIS.
In addition to this, information just came to light from
a US Special Forces raid in May, which shows “undeniable” evidence that
“Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members.”
The second problem is the hope that “relatively moderate Syrian
insurgents” will take over the area. This assumes that there are
moderates, which doesn’t seem to be true, given the fact that the US
essentially gave up on the Free Syrian Army when it decided to create an entirely new force of fighters. Before then, the US had been touting the FSA as moderates. (This, of course, doesn’t get into the fact that, for example, an FSA brigade commander admitted to working with Al Nusra and ISI or that a major beneficiary of this war on ISIS is AL Qaeda.)
