Approximately a month ago, President Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw American troops from the Kurdish-dominated region of Rojava, in Northern Syria. This decision has allowed Turkey to move into the power vacuum left by the exit of the U.S. They have created a 115km long \u201csafe zone\u201d along the Syrian-Turkish border and have been accused of numerous war crimes against the Kurdish population, including jailing and killing journalists and civilians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Russia has also taken advantage of the lack of American troops, and has built its third military base in Syria, a helicopter base in the town of Qamishli. This has increased Russia\u2019s geopolitical strength in Syria, and essentially guaranteed the continuation of the Assad regime. This flies in the face of U.S. policy, which has been to remove Assad from power, and instate a U.S.-aligned regime. However, even without the decision by the U.S. to remove troops from Rojava, regime change in Syria like would have still failed, as the opposition is fractured, and largely dominated by jihadists, such as Al-Nusra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, by removing troops from Rojava, the U.S. has unintentionally sped this process along, and allowed Turkey to further destabilise the region. However, this decision does allow a better relationship between the U.S. and Turkey, which may be more valuable for the U.S. than control of a poor region of Syria. In recent years, Turkey has aligned itself more with Russia, so therefore the U.S. has an interest in keeping them in their sphere of influence. This is especially important to U.S. interests, as tensions between them and Russia have increased since their annexation of Crimea in 2014 and alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and elections throughout Europe, primarily concentrated in Eastern Europe.
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Approximately a month ago, President Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw American troops from the Kurdish-dominated region of Rojava, in Northern Syria. This decision has allowed Turkey to move into the power vacuum left by the exit of the U.S. They have created a 115km long \u201csafe zone\u201d along the Syrian-Turkish border and have been accused of numerous war… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":150,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/150"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3870,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869\/revisions\/3870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}