Image from article, with caption: Smoke rises from Syria's Afrin region, pictured from near the Turkish town of Hassa, on the Turkish-Syrian border, on January 20, 2018.
Washington's abandonment of the Kurds left them with no other choice but to turn to the Assad government and its Russian backers. It's Moscow's chessboard now
Excerpt:
Abandoned by Washington and under bombardment by the Turkish army, the beleaguered Kurdish forces in the northern Syrian town of Afrin asked for, and received, help from Russia. A spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia announced on February 20 that the Russian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad would send reinforcements to Afrin to assist the Kurds. ...
For Washington, the path of least resistance was to use the Kurds to fend off ISIS and then hang them out to dry. That left the Kurds with no other choice but to turn to the Assad government and its Russian backers. As a result, Russia is now the key ally both of the Assad government and the Kurdish militias that the US envisioned as its boots on the ground in the region. ...
Israel, America’s only real ally in the region, realized the consequences immediately. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy minister for public diplomacy, Michael Oren, told Bloomberg News on February 12: “The American part of the equation is to back us up,” but the US “has almost no leverage on the ground. America did not ante up in Syria. It’s not in the game.”...
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