U.S. forces in Syria try to keep warring allies apart

The U.S. military is getting drawn into a deepening struggle for control over areas liberated from the Islamic State that risks prolonging American involvement in wars in Syria and Iraq long after the militants are defeated.

In their first diversion from the task of fighting the Islamic State since the U.S. military’s involvement began in 2014, U.S. troops dispatched to Syria have headed in recent days to the northern town of Manbij, 85 miles northwest of the extremists’ capital, Raqqa, to protect their Kurdish and Arab allies against a threatened assault by other U.S. allies in a Turkish backed force.

Russian troops have also shown up in Manbij under a separate deal that was negotiated without the input of the United States, according to U.S. officials. Under the deal, Syrian troops are to be deployed in the area, also in some form of peacekeeping role, setting up what is effectively a scramble by the armies of four nations to carve up a collection of mostly empty villages in a remote corner of Syria.

With a show of Stars and Stripes, U.S. forces in Syria try to keep warring allies apart

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Ahlevah said:

Things are about to get interesting in Iraq and Syria as ISIS is folded up as a governing force and power vacuums are created. The first test for U.S. forces: Manbij, Aleppo Governorate, Syria. Coalition airstrikes and U.S.-supported SDF forces liberated it from ISIS through two months of bombing and hard fighting, and now the Russians, Turks, and Assad think they're going to just march into it because they agreed (without U.S. input) that it was theirs. Um, apparently not:

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Beaudreaux said:

Way back when, Joe Biden was correct. The middle east is so tribal that the borders drawn at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and post WWI are partially to blame for the unending war in the middle east. The area has to be divided up by ethic and religious sects as it was for millennia, and that may not even work long term. In fact, the only times that at least parts of the middle east have been relatively peaceful is when areas were controlled by oppressive authoritarian regimes such as the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, and so on.

The US is about to find ourselves in the unwinnable position of having to assume the responsibilities of a colonial power paying for and maintaining an insular area, but without assuming or enforcing the power needed to execute the responsibilities we assume by default.

Nation building doesn't work in the culture of the middle east. They aren't true nations, but more or less tribal in governance with territorial aspirations stemming from the 7th century.

We, the US and the west as a whole, will eventually have to decide whether we are going to assume the role of the oppressive authoritarian regime via a colonial overlord system to force peace and disarm the region, or are we going to just let them keep killing each other over top of ~50% of the worlds recoverable crude oil reserves?

In all honesty, if it weren't for the oil, the west would in all likelihood ignore the middle east and let them kill each other off, and they wouldn't hate the west so much for having infidels on their sacred land of Muhammad.

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Ahlevah said:

Another question we have to ask ourselves is whether we're a reliable ally. We've relied on Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to do a lot of the dirty work against ISIS. Are we now going to hang them out to dry as Turkish-backed militias (in Syria) and Iranian-backed militias (in Iraq) attempt to assert control over areas the Kurds shed considerable blood for? Just fold up our tent and say "Not my problem, fellas" as ISIS becomes less of a threat?

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