QAMISHLI, Syria -- When the international manhunt for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, zoomed in on a village in northwestern Syria, the United States turned to its local allies to help track the world's most-wanted terrorist.The U.S. allies, a Kurdish-led force that had partnered
QAMISHLI, Syria — When the international manhunt for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, zoomed in on a village in northwestern Syria, the United States turned to its local allies to help track the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
He decided to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, leaving the Kurds suddenly vulnerable to an invasion by Turkey and feeling stung by an American betrayal, and throwing the al-Baghdadi operation into turmoil as the Kurds suspended their security cooperation with the United States to rush off and defend their land.
Story continues“We said being associated with the U.S. coalition would put you in a position where you would be represented,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, former head of the military’s Special Operations and Central commands, said in a telephone interview. “You’d be on the winning team.” Part of the problem was that U.S. officials sent conflicting messages about how long the United States would stay in Syria and what it was doing there.
If the battles served an American agenda, it was the Kurds who died for it. Fewer than a dozen Americans were killed during the anti-ISIS campaign in Syria, compared with 11,000 from the Kurdish-led forces. When the conflict in Syria began in 2011 with an uprising against President Bashar Assad, the United States tried to back Arab rebels to fight the government, and later to battle the Islamic State. But those efforts failed because of rebel corruption and infighting, defections to extremist groups or lack of American follow-up.
Turkey took particular offense at Abdi, the Syrian commander who became the Americans’ main interlocutor. Abdi, also known as Mazlum Kobani, had joined the Kurdish guerrillas during university and become a protégé of the movement’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan. Officials in Turkey and Iraq say Abdi worked for the group for decades and led a special operations unit that attacked Turkish soldiers.
After the group’s victories in northern Syria, the United States wanted it to pivot south, toward the predominantly Arab provinces of Raqqa and Deir al-Zour, where the Islamic State was strongest. Some Kurds resisted, asking why their youth should die for Arab lands and questioning the U.S. commitment to their people.
In October 2017, backed by U.S. jets and armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, they seized Raqqa, the ISIS capital, where they embarrassed their American partners and angered Turkey by unfurling a banner of Ocalan, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party founder, in a downtown square. The decision baffled the Kurdish-led forces, who were still locked in fierce battles with the Islamic State and would not rout the group from its last patch of territory for another three months.
Trump compromised, ordering the military to reduce the American presence to 1,000 troops, while U.S. officials hinted at a longer-term presence. The partnership appeared to be solid: The United States was seeking Kurdish help for the most sensitive of missions, the hunt for al-Baghdadi. The ensuing fighting killed more than 200 people and delayed the raid on al-Baghdadi’s villa as Abdi’s forces shifted their focus to fighting the Turks.
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