Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington last week to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump. Despite budding tensions over the Trump administration’s decision to arm the Kurdish YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units) militia in Syria, which Erdogan considers to be a terrorist organization, the meeting largely went off without a hitch. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with Soner Cagaptay, Director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “The New Sultan,” about how we should read the result of this first meeting between the two leaders.
The Cipher Brief: What was your reaction to the to the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his visit to Washington last week?
Soner Cagaptay: I was anticipating that the meeting would not produce much breaking news, because Erdogan has already gotten more than half of what he wanted to get from this visit, and he was just very happy to invited. This goes back to the Turkish constitutional referendum in April, which was a very contested race full of irregularities that he won by a very narrow margin. We will probably never know whether the irregularities were large enough to flip the outcome of the vote, which Erdogan won by just 1.5 percent, but in his victory night speech – which to me looked more like a concession speech than a victory speech – he said something really interesting. He said that he would like foreign governments to recognize the outcome of this election as free and fair. If you know Turkish politics, that’s incredibly unusual. Turkey has had free and fair elections since 1950, and there has never really been a concern that elections are not free and not fair. So to me, this was like a Freudian slip. That he was looking for affirmation from outside powers that his victory was fair and square.
Not only did Erdogan love the fact that President Trump called him right after the referendum, but also the fact that he was invited here. So he was more than happy, and he was not interested in creating problems with Trump. He went into the meeting to just soak in the bad news about the U.S. arming the Syrian Kurdish YPG [Peoples’ Protection Units], a blow which Trump had already softened by informing the Turkish delegation of his decision a week before Erdogan’s visit. This saved Erdogan from a major potential embarrassment.
The U.S. arming the YPG, which Turkey considers an enemy, is an issue of serious concern, but I think that, because of the way it was set up, this meeting produced no major crisis, except of course for Erdogan’s guards beating up protesters outside the residence of the Turkish ambassador.
TCB: What do you think the two leaders discussed about the YPG issue?
SC: First of all, the U.S. is likely providing Turkey with guarantees that any heavy weapons given to the YPG will return to the U.S., and that once it liberates Raqqa, the YPG will not stay there. I think that on the first issue, the YPG will deliver. They will return the weapons to the U.S. because these are measured and tracked by Washington, but, on the promise to leave Raqqa, I’m not holding my breath. Especially judging from the group’s previous record in Manbij, a majority Arab city, which they promised to return to its Arab inhabitants but did not. It’s the YPG staying in Manbij that triggered the entry of Turkish troops into Syria for the first time since the war began in that country.
Looking at the YPG’s broader goals, I’m tempted to believe that they will not pull out of Raqqa, and that, even if they did, they might bring in YPG-friendly Arabs as they did in Manbij. Or they might leverage Raqqa and negotiate its handover to the Syrian regime and the Russians in return for continued Russian, regime, and Iranian support to their autonomy economy.
This would be undesirable to Erdogan for two reasons. First, the YPG will be staying in Raqqa and second, the YPG might bring in Arabs who are friendly to the regime. Erdogan hates both the YPG and the regime, so this is where you might see a crisis down the road.
The other part of this is that the U.S. is trying to compartmentalize its relations with the YPG in Syria and the PKK in Turkey and Iraq. It is telling the Turks that if they look the other way in Syria, the U.S. will look the other way in Iraq where Turkey wants to fight the PKK. But the U.S. is also asking them not to do this right now, to wait until after Raqqa and Mosul are liberated. After that, the U.S. is signaling that it could even help the Turks to fight the PKK in Sinjar, Iraq.
The PKK’s current headquarters is in Iraqi Kurdistan in the Qandil mountains along the Iranian-Iraqi border, but this is far from the PKK’s operations in Syria. Sinjar not only lies at the Iraqi-Syrian border but it actually spills into Syria. So this provides the PKK with a perfect center for operations inside Iraq, but more importantly also spilling into Syria, and also for operations in Turkey. Thus, the PKK has been moving material and infrastructure into Sinjar. Turkey will do everything it can to prevent this fait accompli, and to me, that’s the third step of this deal, where, after Raqqa and Mosul are liberated, the U.S. is signaling that it could help Turkey launch an operation in Sinjar. In this regard, Turkey would actually be helped by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and its leader Masoud Barzani, who also don’t want the PKK in Sinjar. The KRG actually wants the PKK out even more than does Turkey does. Finally, the U.S. is also promising assistance against the PKK in Europe, where the group has significant fundraising, extortion, and drug trafficking networks.
That’s the kind of deal that I saw likely coming out of the meeting. Compartmentalizing Iraq and Syria and offering Turkey help against the PKK in Europe.
TCB: How about the beating of the protesters outside the Turkish embassy residence? What was significant about that incident to you?
SC: The reason why this is important is because it signals, to me, it is Turkey’s deep and increasingly violent polarization, which I explain in The New Sultan, spilling into the streets of Washington. Turkey is an extremely polarized place right now, and that seems to be moving towards is becoming a violent sort of polarization. There have been a very large number of terror attacks recently, and the government has been cracking down hard on dissent and opposition. It looks to me that beating demonstrators has become such a modus operandi in Turkey that Erdogan or his guards saw nothing wrong with doing that in the U.S., because this is how they seem to function sadly, and this is how they operate. It also shows how fast Turkey’s polarization can turn violent, because even in the context of being at the heart of the world’s largest democracy did not seem to have put any reason in the minds of Erdogan’s guards.
