Make ISIS Great Again: A Look at how President Trump's Abandonment of our Kurdish Allies is Leading to a Resurgence of ISIS

Map via Wikimedia Commons

The man who once said that former President Barack Obama had “founded ISIS” has just said hold my beer.

President Trump’s recent decision to pull all American forces out of northeast Syria hasn’t just abandoned our closest ally in the region, he has pumped new life into the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A U.S. official recently told CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh that the campaign to defeat ISIS in Syria is “over for now,” saying ISIS “has a second lease on life with nearly 100,000 [fighters and their families] who will re-join their jihad.” ISIS has been made great again.

For those here in America who think the recent killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi signals the end of the jihadist organization, there are bad news. U.S. military and civilian intelligence puts the current number of ISIS fighters in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000. These individuals have had years of experience in funding, planning, and carrying out coordinated and complex terrorist attacks. This includes some who predate the creation of ISIS, getting their start as members of al-Qaeda, the jihadist terrorist group that ISIS originated from. The so-called Islamic State has intentionally decentralized their leadership and operations worldwide, evolving into numerous ISIS affiliates around the globe.

Earlier this year, an ISIS affiliate in Sri Lanka orchestrated the largest terrorist attack ever executed outside of their physical caliphate, killing over 250 people in six simultaneous attacks across three different cities. This happened after the defeat of the physical ISIS caliphate. Last week ISIS-aligned militants in Mali killed over 50 government soldiers in a complex and well-executed attack on a military outpost. This took place after al-Baghdadi’s death. That attack followed the killing of 38 Malian soldiers by a local ISIS affiliate a month prior. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria —Khorasan (ISIS-K) commands thousands of fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report. ISIS, with its various franchises, has become the Subway sandwiches of terrorist groups. This makes it increasingly hard to acquire actionable intelligence without coalition counterterrorism forces constantly on the ground around the world.

The United States has and continues to take ISIS leaders off the board, as they quickly followed up the death of al-Baghdadi with a drone strike of the now former ISIS spokesman Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir in Jarabulus, Syria. Both men were replaced within days, with Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi officially taking the helm from al-Baghdadi, according to the new ISIS media spokesman. In the same way that the elimination of Osama bin Laden did not end al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi’s death does not spell the end of the so-called Islamic State. While al-Baghdadi’s death is a significant tactical and propaganda win in the fight against ISIS, it does not change the overall equation.

The killing of al-Baghdadi highlights the importance of maintaining alliances and a presence on the ground. Kurdish intelligence was critical to locating al-Baghdadi and his compound in Barisha, Syria. According to Gen. Mazloum Abdi of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the predominately Kurdish Syrian group that is mainly comprised of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a disgruntled member of al-Baghdadi’s security team provided the Kurds with the ISIS leader’s location. This individual obtained al-Baghdadi’s soiled underwear and a sample of his blood, which was then turned over to U.S. forces in order to get a positive DNA match. The U.S. had previously obtained al-Baghdadi’s DNA in 2004 while he was a prisoner at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. A senior U.S. State Department official said that the SDF “played a key role” in the raid, according to CNN’s Jennifer Hansler.

American forces who conducted the raid on al-Baghdadi’s Syrian compound were forced to stage out of Iraq because of Trump’s impulsive and rash decision to withdraw from the autonomous Kurdish region in northeast Syria known as Rojava. Iraqi President Barham Salih said last week that he will have to “recalibrate” his country’s relationship with America in light of Trump pulling U.S. forces out of Rojava. When asked whether that might mean forming alliances with Russia and Iran, Salih responded, “Of course…we need to think of our own priorities.” Creating vacuums of power around the globe does not necessarily translate to a safer or more secure world, especially when you hand over the keys to murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

Former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nick Rasmussen, recently said, “The efforts to go after terrorists abroad, and to prevent terrorists from succeeding at what they’re trying to do, requires us to be present and forward deployed around the world…we were actually doing what we were doing in Syria with a pretty significant economy of force. We were not there with tens of thousands of troops. We were working with partners…and we were having impact. And what I worry about is if you flash forward six months and we actually implement and execute some of the decisions the president has made with respect to Syria going forward, I’m not sure we’d be able to execute the kind of operation that was executed [in killing al-Baghdadi]. And that’s not a place we want to be.”

Credit for the death of al-Baghdadi goes to U.S forces who conducted the raid, as well as all the individuals who participated in the thousands of missions that led up to that point. This includes U.S. Special Operations, conventional forces, civilian and military intelligence, and our allies on the ground and in the sky. Or as some might call them, the “Deep State." Foremost among our allies are the Kurdish-led SDF and YPG, who we just stabbed in the back.

Trump’s self-congratulatory press conference announcing al-Baghdadi’s death was both puzzling and disgraceful. He thanked Russia, Turkey, and Syria before he thanked U.S forces and our Syrian Kurdish allies. As former Deputy Chief of Staff, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Michael Leiter told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “[The Kurds] were mentioned in the same breath as Syria and Russia, and I don’t think they should be. Unlike those two countries, the Kurds are our allies, have been our allies, and yes, their intelligence was critical here [in the al-Baghdadi raid]…we are no longer in a position to collect that [intelligence] because of the movement out of Syria by both U.S troops and the Turkish incursion in northeast Syria.”

Both al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir were found to be hiding out within minutes of the Turkish border, yet Turkey provided no assistance whatsoever in planning, staging, or executing the operations. Moscow itself has said they’re not aware of any assistance provided in the raid. U.S Special Operation forces and supporting aircraft killed over 200 Russian mercenaries in a failed attack on a U.S. military outpost in Syria early last year. Putin and Moscow have continued to fund and arm the Taliban in their ongoing war with coalition forces in Afghanistan, according to multiple top U.S. commanders in the region. Russia is neither our ally nor our friend. Putin has American blood on his hands. Why our Commander-in-Chief decided to thank Russia and Putin above all others is a mystery, albeit one that fits a consistent pattern of behavior.

Another mystery is Trump’s repeated claim that al-Baghdadi’s last moments were spent “whimpering and crying and screaming,” adding that he “died like a dog”. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley, and the head of U.S. Central Command Gen. Frank McKenzie have all stated that they have seen no evidence to back up Trump’s claim. Multiple U.S personnel on target would have been wearing body cameras for a mission of this importance, including the canines. It is highly likely that there was in fact whimpering and crying in the dead-end tunnel al-Baghdadi hid and died in, as he had taken two young children with him before detonating his suicide vest.

Portraying America and our military as a bully doesn’t further American national security. Counter-terrorism is a form of counter-insurgency, requiring the help of local civilians to adequately deal with the longterm threat posed. This fake tough-guy talk from Trump only serves to further inflate his own delicate ego. Terrorists don’t care what potty-mouthed schoolyard names you call them, but ordinary civilians definitely take notice. This isn’t how you defeat terrorists; it’s how you spawn the next generation of them. We should expect this nonsensical bluster out of the loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar, not our Commander-in-Chief.

President Trump has since backtracked on his initial promise to pull all American troops out of Rojava, keeping some U.S. forces in the region in order to guard oil fields. Abandoning our closest ally in the region was of no concern to Trump, but the black liquid gold underground seems to be another matter entirely. It has been American foreign policy for decades to not construe our presence in the Middle East with an attempt to steal other nation-state’s oil and resources, but that has obviously changed. As Trump said last week in his press conference announcing al-Baghdadi’s death, the United States “should be able to take some [Syrian oil]…what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” To add insult to injury, Trump said that Syrian Kurds should abandon their longtime homelands and move to the oil fields, in order to receive continued American military protection. It appears that Trump’s policy regarding our military is to bring our men and women in uniform back home safely, unless we can make a buck out of it.

Trump hasn’t just abandoned the SDF and their Kurdish-majority fighters, he has offered them up for the slaughter. Trump’s negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has given us perhaps the greatest American capitulation in modern world history. Not only did Trump fail to sanction Turkey and “swiftly destroy” their economy as he had threatened, he gave Erdogan exactly what he and Turkey have long sought after: the land seizure of large swaths of the Kurdish homeland in Rojava and the ability to exterminate any Kurds within those regions. As Trump said after agreeing to Turkey’s terms, “they had to have it cleaned out,” referring to an “ultimate solution” required for dealing with the situation. If those terms sound familiar, you’d be right. There was much talk of the “Final Solution” in 1940s Germany, in regards to the extermination of the Jewish people.

Keep in mind, this was only a week after Turkish military artillery “accidentally” bracketed American troops in the area, firing shells within a few hundred meters of an American base. Turkey had known for months the location of the American base, “down to explicit grid coordinate detail,” according to Gen. Milley. To be clear, a NATO ally fired multiple 155mm artillery rounds directly at American forces, shelling both sides of the base as a show of force and not so subtle warning to get out of town. Trump bent the knee within days.

In a pathetic letter to Erdogan last month, Trump pleaded with the Turkish dictator, “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool! I will call you later.” Turkish presidential sources have told the BBC that “President Erdogan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it and put it in the bin.” Last year Trump claimed that “the United States is respected again.” Maybe crumbling up and throwing a letter from an American president straight into the garbage is a sign of respect for the Turks.

Under the agreement between Trump and Erdogan, much of Rojava will be handed over to Turkey. All Kurds who remain in that region must disarm themselves. They were given five days to do so or leave their homeland. This is not an area of the world where the Kurds can disarm themselves without fully expecting to be slaughtered by any number of groups, chiefly Turkey and the Arab jihadist militias they fund and support. War crimes have already been reportedly carried out by the Turkish military and their allies, including against Hevrin Khalaf, a well known female Kurdish politician who was tortured, raped, and murdered on the major highway traversing Rojava known as the M4. America’s allies, the Kurds, are being forcibly removed from their homeland that they’ve lived on for generations because of our Commander-in-Chief’s policy. What did America get in return for our betrayal of the Kurds? It’s not clear we achieved a single national security goal.

The Kurdish people have been perhaps our fiercest and most loyal allies in the Middle East going back generations. Spread out throughout Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Armenia, the Kurds have struggled unsuccessfully to carve out their own internationally recognized nation-state. Even after the George H.W. Bush administration abandoned Iraqi Kurds to Saddam Hussein after they supported us in the first Iraq War, after which thousands were infamously gassed to death in retribution, they still chose to support America and our foreign policy goals; first in Iraq helping to topple the Saddam regime, and later in both Iraq and Syria in America’s fight against the Islamic State. Counting both the Iraqi Peshmerga and Syrian YPG, the Kurds lost over 11,000 fighters in the war against ISIS, with an additional 24,000 injured. Kurdish civilian deaths number in the thousands. In comparison, the U.S has lost just six service members and two civilians in the regional fight against ISIS. Without the Kurds doing the heavy lifting on the ground, every one of their causalities would have been men and women of the American armed forces. The Kurds cleared the ISIS caliphate town by town, compound by compound, room by room. It was the Kurdish-led SDF that captured ISIS’s capital of Raqqa, Syria. As one Army officer who served in the Syria campaign alongside the Kurds told David Ignatius of the Washington Post, “It will go down in infamy. This will go down as a stain on the American reputation for decades.”

In defense of his abandonment of the Kurds, Trump said that they were “no angels themselves”. He painted the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish militant and political group that has been involved in ongoing conflict with Turkey over Kurdish autonomy, as representative of all Kurdish people. Trump called them “more of a terrorist threat in many ways than ISIS”. While the PKK is officially listed as a terrorist organization by our state department, they are in no way comparable to international jihadist organizations like ISIS that threaten the American homeland. Putting aside that specific Turkish state media talking point, Turkey itself has said their military operation in Syria is not against the PKK, but instead the YPG. Many American civilians have fought with and died as part of the YPG’s campaign against the Islamic State, including numerous U.S. military veterans.

At a political reelection rally in Dallas last month, Trump described the situation as “two kids in a lot, you’ve gotta let’em fight and then you pull them apart,” calling his foreign policy by-tweet “tough love”. He thanked Erdogan for being “a gentleman,” at the same time as Turkish forces and their allies almost immediately broke the five-day cease-fire that had been agreed upon. President Trump, basking in the warm glow of his energetic and receptive supporters at the American Airlines Center, added, “It was nasty…It’s not fun having bullets going all over the place.” Perhaps he was thinking of the time he saw Saving Private Ryan on the big screen.

In response to criticism of his Syrian policy from his own ex-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who said Trump’s decision would “absolutely” guarantee a resurgence of ISIS, Trump called him “the world’s most overrated general.” Trump continued, “You know why? He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month.” Neither Trump nor his family has ever served this country in uniform, either in war or peacetime.

Another former head of SOCOM, retired Gen. Joseph Votel, also recently criticized Trump’s policy decisions regarding Syria. In last month’s The Atlantic, Votel wrote, “This policy abandonment threatens to undo five years’ worth of fighting against ISIS and will severely damage American credibility and reliability in any future fights where we need strong allies.” As Votel sadly lamented, “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Unsurprisingly, Russian state media has been on a victory tour since Trump’s impulsive and abrupt order to pull all American forces out of Rojava. They have gleefully reported from abandoned U.S. military bases we had been staging out of, where we left in such a hurry that our forces didn’t have enough time to take out anything other than weapons, armored vehicles, and classified material. America retreated and Russia moved in to fill the void within days. Once again the question for Americans is why. If Trump actually wanted to bring American troops back home from “endless wars,” why has he deployed over 14,000 additional U.S. troops to other parts of the Middle East since May?

Hundreds of ISIS members and their families have already escaped from the Kurdish-run prisons and camps they were being held in, with much of it captured on video for the world to see. Jihadists could not have dreamed of a larger propaganda win. It is only a matter of time before we see an explosion, pun sadly intended, of ISIS terrorist activity across Europe, the larger world, and quite possibly here in the States. Terrorism is truly a never ending war, especially when it comes to international terror groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Turkish-backed Arab militias full of “ex” al-Qaeda and ISIS members have already started releasing ISIS prisoners and their families as they sweep across areas of Rojava that the Kurds have recently been forced to evacuate. ISIS could not have written a better script for how things have unfolded since Trump’s decision to abandon this part of the Middle East to the Russians, the Syrians, and the Turks. How many Kurds and coalition forces died to capture those now freed ISIS detainees? Why was there no plan by Trump to at least take out the approximately 50 high value targets among the thousands of ISIS prisoners? What possible explanation is there for these decisions being made not upon the advice of American military brass and seasoned diplomats, but a single phone call between Trump and Erdogan?

The President of the United States of America has given an unbelievable gift to our enemies. Every piece of this puzzle goes against American national security and foreign policy interests. Not one military leader or American diplomat is on the record agreeing with his decision to leave northeast Syria. Pulling American military and diplomatic power from the region will not “End Endless Wars,” as many people mistakenly think.

American forces have been on the ground in Syria as part of our anti-ISIS campaign, as well as force protection for our Kurdish allies. We could not have executed the al-Baghdadi raid without the help of our allies, as well as having U.S. or partner military bases in the region to stage out of. This is the real world, not Rambo: First Blood Part II.

When asked if he was worried about released ISIS fighters carrying out future terrorists attacks, Trump responded, “Well, they’re going to be escaping to Europe. That’s where they want to go.” Trump followed up days later by saying his capitulation to Erdogan, Assad, and Putin had resulted in a “great outcome” for the Kurdish people, while his own special envoy for Syria recently said that U.S forces had already seen “several incidents which we consider war crimes” against the Kurds. We are witnessing the demise of American leadership and moral standing in the world. The next administration, no matter what party or political leaning, will not be able to turn back the clock and undo the damage that has been done. Actions have consequences, and no-ones wealthy daddy can buy America’s way out of this one.

Trump once again lied when he said those American forces leaving Rojava would be coming home from “endless wars”. According to Secretary Esper and journalists on the ground, those U.S forces instead headed east into Iraq. They are not “coming home,” as Trump has repeatedly said, they simply have been bullied out of Syria. Our troops have been ordered by their Commander-in-Chief to tuck tail and run. As one Special Operator on the ground in Syria recently put it to Fox News national security reporter Jennifer Griffin, “I am ashamed for the first time in my career.”

The stain of the Trump presidency will have long-lasting ramifications when it comes to American national security and foreign policy. Trump has undermined the credibility of American institutions, both at home and abroad. Our allies no longer trust us, while our enemies no longer fear us. America isn’t the only country in the world to have televisions and internet access. We have given Kim Jong Un and North Korea legitimacy in the eyes of the world; we have kowtowed to and protected the butchers of Saudi; we have been taken out behind the woodshed by China and Xi Jinping in the trade war; we have emboldened Iran by putting them back on track to become the newest world nuclear power; and more than anything else, we have for some unknown reason continued to carry water for Vladimir Putin and Russia. Putin is now the power broker in the Middle East. The Kurds have already had to cut deals with Putin and the murderous Assad regime to protect themselves from the Turkish invasion of their homeland, as the last hope in avoiding yet another full-scale genocide of their people.

According to veteran war journalist Richard Engel of NBC News, who has reported on the ground in Turkey and Syria since Trump’s announcement, “We are setting up a situation for absolute chaos, potently even civil war here. I think what we’re seeing here is President Trump using the power of the presidency to shake the world and turn it into some sort of snow globe, and the people who get hurt the most are those who do not really have the position to defend themselves. And in this case, it was the Kurdish people who had their homeland given away tonight by President Trump.” As Engel put it, “Now the Kurds say…they have no future. This little thing that they created, they call it Rojava. This little state has been gobbled up by Turkey, which will control and patrol the area. And American troops are leaving, the American troops who were protecting them…For five years [the Kurds] created something. That entity was attacked, and while they needed defense, American troops pulled out. And now they are left with less than they ever had before.”

President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with saying “speak softly and carry a big stick” when it comes to foreign policy. History books will describe the Trump doctrine as “tweet loudly and bend the knee to dictators”. He has blown-up generations of goodwill and trust in literally only a matter of days. As the saying goes, “trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.” America will be living with the consequences of the Trump era for generations to come, especially those individuals serving our national security interests on the frontlines around the world.