The officials say that the US is supplying only light weapons and they are going to the Arab contingent of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). However, Kurdish officials linked to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the dominant partner in the SDF, say they have been promised the US will arm them directly if they lead the battle for Isis’s Syrian stronghold in Raqqa.
Ankara has reacted furiously to news of the arms supplies, as it views the YPG as a terrorist group, linked to Turkish Kurd militants. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he found out about US planes carrying arms landing at the Kurd-controlled town of Kobani, while he was attending the UN general assembly in New York, at which he met the US vice-president, Joe Biden. Erdogan claimed Biden said he was unaware of the arms deliveries.
The US insists that the weapons do not represent a threat to Ankara and are essential to the effort to deal a potentially decisive blow to Isis, something Obama is keen to achieve before leaving office.
“We are eager to go after Raqqa now. There is a real opportunity to crush the Caliphate,” a senior US administration official said. He said that although the Turks and Kurds clashed in August, they have together managed to expel Isis from the entire Turkish-Syrian border. Tensions were further defused when the YPG withdrew to a position east of the Euphrates, leaving the west bank mostly to the Turks and Turkish-backed elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Manbij town is still run by a SDF-dominated military council.
The challenge now was to get them to cooperate in a deeper thrust into Isis heartland.
“Our entire strategy revolves around working the most capable forces. Sometimes those forces don’t get on, but we are seeking to reduce the friction points between them,” the official said.
On Tuesday, Washington dispatched the deputy secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to Ankara, along with Obama’s anti-Isis envoy, Brett McGurk, and Lt Gen Townsend, the commander of Inherent Resolve, the US-led military campaign against Isis. Their task was to mollify the Turks and maintain Turkish support for plans to capture three Isis bastions: Dabiq, Raqqa, and Mosul in Iraq.
US officials hope to convince Erdogan that arming the SDF is the only way to strike a decisive blow at Raqqa, but Sinen Ülgen, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, said the more public the arms flow becomes, the harder it will be accept for a government waging a war at home against insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
“It is one thing if the weapons assistance to the YPG remains a covert operation. But a change in declaratory policy with the US fully accepting this assistance is likely to give rise to a severe reaction in Ankara,” Ülgen said. “Given the backdrop of the continuing campaign against the PKK with almost daily casualties, Ankara can never condone such a move by Washington. It will further fuel the rising anti-Americanism of the post-coup environment.”
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