Middle East & North Africa

He inherited the conflict. It’s up to him to resolve it responsibly.

Turkey and the US have been at loggerheads over Syria in the wake of President Trump's decision to pull US troops out of the country. The Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the US national security adviser, John Bolton, had made a serious mistake in suggesting the withdrawal was conditional on Ankara agreeing to security guarantees for US-backed Kurdish fighters.

If one contemplates necessary steps of the parties to the conflict, the nature of this war must be kept in mind. It started as a UN supported intervention by a Saudi-led coalition against the Iran-supported Houthi rebellion opposing the Hadi government. The domestic struggle for supremacy is inextricably linked to its international ramifications: Given the potentially enormous geopolitical consequences the prevention of an Iranian foothold on the Southern tip of the Arabian peninsula is by no means a goal of only Saudi Arabia. 

NPR's All Thing Considered talked to Amanda Sloat, Fellow at the Belfer Center's Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, about Turkey's investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The deadly civil war in Yemen has reached a climax after three ugly years. No one can know for sure, but it looks like the coalition led by Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a major victory that could push the Iranian-backed rebels into an enduring cease-fire.

The legitimate Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is poised to retake control of the vital port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth-largest city and its principal port on the Red Sea. Yemen depends on imports to survive and Hodeidah is the port of entry for most outside goods. International aid groups worry a long-term siege there could disrupt the already-limited flow of medicine and food into the country. But the pain is worth the gain – especially for U.S. interests – because of Hodeidah’s strategic importance.

The war in Syria is the vortex of roughly three crisscrossing conflict fronts.  The origin and the center is the conflict between the Assad-government and the national opposition - enlarged regionally by Iran, Hezbollah and fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan supporting the government while Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia support the opposition in a sort of Shia-Sunni confrontation. This conflict front has been enlarged geopolitically by the United States supporting the opposition and Russia the Assad-government, indeed, using the conflict to implant herself as a major actor the Middle East.

Since 11 September 2001 the United States has been able to drive the global counterterrorism agenda as it saw necessary. Those days are over. The global environment has permanently shifted. The open rivalry with Moscow and growing competition with China are going to increase the potential costs on U.S. counterterrorism activity and outright restrain it in others.

It is ironic that when President Trump finally made his first major foreign policy decision, he ran with the advice of his “cooler heads” — the Generals he admires — over his own instincts to cut U.S. losses and get out of this jungle. In extending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan for the narrower purpose of battling the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and associated groups, every U.S. soldier killed and wounded in Afghanistan from this day forward becomes in effect a casualty of the scourge of terrorism the president is determined to thwart.