US Warns Turkey Against Expanding Syria War

NATO Struggles to Try to Keep US, Turkish Forces Apart

Turkey’s Friday announcement that their invasion of Syrian Kurdistan is going to be expanded eastward, all the way to the Iraqi border, is not being welcomed by the US nor its allies, who are warning against reckless escalations.

NATO nations have been expressing growing disquiet about the risk of direct conflict between two of their most substantial member nations, and are saying the US and Turkey have been working hard to avoid direct conflict within Afrin District.

That’s been made quite a bit simpler by the fact that the US, though its troops are embedded in Syrian Kurdish territory, are not generally believed to be in Afrin in the first place. As the Turkish forces move onward, to Manbij and elsewhere, that will no longer be the case.

US calls to keep the war confined to Afrin, and Turkey’s warnings that the US troops would be targeted if they keep helping the Kurds, point to this being the tip of a potentially calamitous iceberg, with both nations determined not to let the other dictate their Syria policy, but in doing so steering themselves into a direct confrontation.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.