US to Build Military Outposts on Syria-Turkey Border

Officials say posts will reduce tensions between Turkey, YPG

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Defense Secretary James Mattis revealed that the US intends to build a number of new military “observation outposts” on the Turkey-Syria border. The posts will be inside Syrian territory, where the Kurdish forces are based.

The intention is to reduce tensions between the Turkish government and the Kurdish YPG. Mattis says that the US would be able to “call the Turks and warn them if we see something coming out of an area we’re operating in.”

In theory, this is to be understood as warning if the YPG (who the Turks consider terrorists) are attacking Turkey. In practice, Turkey has tended to carry out most of the attacks, however, which means the US posts may be taken as intended to give the Kurds advance notice.

While the US has made several efforts to limit the risks of conflict between the YPG and the Turkish military, both sides are broadly hostile toward one another. If anything, this reflects US intentions to have more facilities, and a more or less permanent set of outposts in Syria.

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. View all posts by Jason Ditz

Click here to hide comments

8 thoughts on “US to Build Military Outposts on Syria-Turkey Border”

Mick McNulty says:

November 22, 2018 at 9:09 am

US lawlessness knows no bounds and it’s unlikely to stop until the world gets together to stop it, like it was forced to do with the first bunch of Nazis. We’ll be left with no choice in the end.
rosemerry says:

November 22, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Is there any part of the world that the USA is not interested in “helping”?
Has it ever looked inside the areas of its influence and found any benefit except for “good defense companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing”….???
1. Don Bacon says:
  
  November 22, 2018 at 3:47 pm
  
  US wars are useful as a foreign military sales technique, according to the US Air Force chief of staff. Mo war, mo money.
  
  U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, returning from a trip to Colombia, said over the weekend that the Trump administration is making a push to strengthen alliances across Latin America as part of an effort to counter rising Chinese and Russian influence in the United States’ backyard.
  In an interview with Foreign Policy, Goldfein said Colombia and other Latin American countries risked being locked out of U.S. and allied operations if they stopped buying military hardware from the United States and turned to other markets instead.
  “While there may be other cheap hardware out there that might be available on the market, at some point it becomes really hard to make it connect and share within the system,” Goldfein said by phone Saturday while flying home from Colombia. . .here
  
  Imagine the shame from being locked out of US wars!
  1. rosemerry says:
    
    November 23, 2018 at 12:58 am
    
    The backyard of the USA occupies a large section of planet earth!
    China has been long present in Latin America without the usual US aim of arming those it favors. All the years of this century with governments trying to help the people in their countries seem to be at an end, but the USA is never satisfied with just a few conquests-all must be under its thumb.
    
    btw, I suppose it is antisemitic to note the name of U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.
Don Bacon says:

November 22, 2018 at 9:19 am

Mattis’s convoluted logic

We are putting in OPs up in northern Syria, this is the change now, okay? We are putting in observation posts in several locations up along the Syria border — northern Syria border because we want to be the people who call the Turks and warn them if we see something coming out of an area that we’re operating in. This is closely collaborated — we are consulting closely with Turkey, military and State Department. Both were consulting with them.

We are going to track any threat that we can spot going up into Turkey. That means we will be talking to Turkish military across the border. They will be very clearly marked locations day and night so that the Turks know where they’re at, and what this is designed to do is to make sure that the people we have fighting down in the MERV [Middle Euphrates River Valley] are not drawn off that fight, that we can crush what’s left of the geographic caliphate, which is of course, as the enemy gets pushed into smaller and smaller areas, they’re in effect, reinforcing that what they still hold. And so it is the tough fighting that we said it would be sometime of the — many months ago. . .here

The US war on ISIS started four years ago, isn’t finished yet, and now the best they can do to “crush” ISIS is to place observation posts in that enemy country hundreds of miles away . . .and they expect this military to take on China and/or Russia with stupid tactics like that? hah
Mark Thomason says:

November 23, 2018 at 2:21 pm

This will increase those tensions. The Kurds will attempt to use them as bases on the border of Turkey, bases defended by the US, as safe haven to run an insurgency into Turkey. We know because that is what the US did to Syria, and the same people doing it the same way.

Comments are closed.