Many Islamic State fighters managed to escape from prison camps that Kurdish guards had to abandon to try to resist the marauding Turkish hordes that the US President's bizarre decision unleashed.
PRESIDENT Donald Trump has once again shown how ill-informed his grasp of United States foreign policy is and how he could potentially pose a threat to civilisation as we know it. That this man, who could trigger a nuclear war at the push of a button, thought nothing of betraying the Kurdish people, whose militia had helped the US to overcome the caliphate of terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS) – losing 11,000 of its troops in the process – speaks volumes about his ignorance of world affairs, especially in the volatile Middle East region, and also upset his own Republican Party.
By pulling US troops out of Syria, Trump effectively cleared the way for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to go after the Kurds, who he views as terrorists, killing hundreds of them and displacing tens of thousands of their people. Russia – a staunch ally of Syria’s dictatorial leader Bashar al-Assad – quickly moved its troops into the bases abandoned by the American Special Forces, gaining a bigger foothold in the territory.
IS will have been emboldened by Trump’s erratic behaviour, in spite of the subsequent killing of their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, especially as many of their fighters managed to escape from prison camps that Kurdish guards had to abandon to try to resist the marauding Turkish hordes that the US President’s bizarre decision unleashed.
Little wonder then that the US House of Representatives voted by 354 votes to 60 to condemn the withdrawal of troops. Trump’s pathetic attempts to justify abandoning the Kurds – the world’s largest ethnic group without a state – further highlighted his ignorance of world affairs when he protested that they hadn’t help the US in Normandy during World War II; you just couldn’t make it up!
What he has done to sell out the Kurds has inflicted even more scorn on any US pretext to be an honest broker in suing for peace in the region.
