News

The Grotesque Savagery of Turkey's Mercenaries
Tuesday, November 12, 2019

By David L. Phillips

A Kurdish woman fled Turkish troops and their Islamist mercenaries when Turkey launched an unprovoked attack on the City of Afrin, a Kurdish community in northern Syria, on Jan. 20, 2018. The woman was running hand-in-hand with her young daughter when a missile obliterated the girl. The mother held onto her arm — all that was left of her child.

Indigenous Peoples and Borders Symposium Livestream Information
Friday, November 8, 2019

Indigenous Peoples and Borders Symposium at Columbia 11-12 November will be live streamed here.

NPR WorldAffairs new podcast episode: "The Crisis in Syria: A Geopolitical Reshuffling of Power"
David L. Phillips interviewed on WorldAffairs
Tuesday, November 5, 2019

The withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria has had grave repercussions for the security and stability of the entire region. The Turkish military has invaded northern Syria, killing dozens of Kurdish civilians and forcing over 200,000 Kurds to flee. In the absence of US troops, Russian and Syrian troops have rushed in to fill the power vacuum. Meanwhile, hundreds of ISIS fighters have escaped detention.

Securing Syria's Oil
Thursday, October 31, 2019

Trump's peripatetic Syria policy zigzagged again over the weekend. After announcing that the U.S. would withdraw from Northern Syria, Trump changed course, announcing: "We've secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we're going to be protecting it, and we'll be deciding what we're going to do with it in the future."
 

Turkey’s Erdoğan protected ISIS leader Baghdadi
Thursday, October 31, 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan protected Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - and U.S. President Donald Trump should have known.

In his national address announcing that U.S. Special Forces killed Baghdadi, Trump commended Turkey while turning a blind eye to Turkey’s collusion with ISIS.

While Trump thanked “the Syrian Kurds for certain support they were able to give us,” he downplayed the importance of intelligence provided by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But the SDF’s information was critical to the mission.

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