Targeting Turkey's economy, US President Donald Trump announced sanctions aimed at restraining the Turks' assault against Kurdish fighters and civilians in Syria – an assault Turkey began after Trump announced he was moving US troops out of the way.
The United States on Monday also called on Turkey to stop the invasion and declare a ceasefire, and Trump plans to send Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien to Ankara as soon as possible in an attempt to begin negotiations. Pence said Trump spoke directly to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who promised not attack the border town of Kobani, which in 2015 witnessed the Islamic State group's first defeat in a battle by US-backed Kurdish fighters.
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"President Trump communicated to him very clearly that the United States of America wants Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate ceasefire, and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence," Pence said.
"The United States of America simply is not going to tolerate Turkey's invasion in Syria any further. We are calling on Turkey to stand down, end the violence, and come to the negotiating table," the vice president said.
The US withdrawal was criticized at home and abroad as opening the door to a resurgence of the Islamic State group, whose violent takeover of Syrian and Iraqi lands five years ago was the reason American forces came in the first place.
Trump said the approximately 1,000 US troops who had been partnering with local Kurdish fighters to battle IS in northern Syria are leaving the country. They will remain in the Middle East, he said, to "monitor the situation" and to prevent a revival of IS – a goal that even Trump's allies say has become much harder as a result of the US pullout.
The Turks began attacks against the Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the Turks see as terrorists, last week. On Monday, Syrian government troops moved north toward the border region, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces.
Trump said Turkey's invasion is "precipitating a humanitarian crisis and setting conditions for possible war crimes," a reference to reports of Turkish-backed fighters executing Kurdish fighters on the battlefield.
The Kurdish forces previously allied with the US said they had reached a deal with Syrian President Bashar Assad's government to help them fend off Turkey's invasion, a move that brings Russian forces deeper into the conflict.
The Syrian army deployment is a victory for President Bashar Assad and his most powerful ally, Russia, giving them a foothold in the biggest remaining swath of the country that had been beyond their grasp.
They will now face Turkish armed forces along a new front line hundreds of miles long.
Syrian state media reported the army entered Manbij, a town that had been controlled by a militia allied to the Kurds. Earlier, it pushed into Tel Tamer, a town on the strategically important M4 highway that runs east-west around 30 km (20 miles) south of the frontier with Turkey.
State television later showed residents welcoming Syrian forces into the town of Ain Issa, which lies on another part of the highway, hundreds of miles away.
Ain Issa commands the northern approaches to Raqqa, former capital of the Islamic State caliphate, which Kurdish fighters recaptured from the militants two years ago in one of the biggest victories of a US-led campaign.
Much of the M4 skirts the southern fringe of territory where Turkey aims to set up a "safe zone" inside Syria. Turkey said it had seized part of the highway. An official of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said clashes were ongoing.
US strategy unraveling
The swift Syrian government deployments underscored how suddenly the strategy the United States had pursued in Syria for the past five years had unraveled. Washington said on Sunday it was pulling out its entire force of 1,000 troops, which had provided air support, ground assistance and training for Syrian Kurds against Islamic State since 2014.
In his sanctions announcement, Trump said he was halting negotiations on a $100 billion trade deal with Turkey and raising steel tariffs back up to 50%. Trump also imposed sanctions on three senior Turkish officials and Turkey's Defense and Energy Ministries.
"I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey's economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path," Trump said.
US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the sanctions will hurt an already weak Turkish economy. Pence said Washington will continue to ramp up the sanctions "unless Turkey is willing to embrace a ceasefire, come to the negotiating table, and end the violence."
The move was quickly criticized as too little, too late by the top Democrat in Congress.
"His announcement of a package of sanctions against Turkey falls very short of reversing that humanitarian disaster," said US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), normally a staunch Trump supporter, said he was "gravely concerned" by events in Syria and Trump's response so far.
Withdrawing US forces from Syria "would re-create the very conditions that we have worked hard to destroy and invite the resurgence of ISIS," he said in a statement. "And such a withdrawal would also create a broader power vacuum in Syria that will be exploited by Iran and Russia, a catastrophic outcome for the United States' strategic interests."
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump is weakening America.
"To be clear, this administration's chaotic and haphazard approach to policy by tweet is endangering the lives of US troops and civilians," Menendez said in a statement.
However, Trump got quick support from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who earlier had lambasted his withdrawal decision as "shortsighted," ''irresponsible," and "unnerving to its core." Graham said he was asked to join the president and his team for phone calls with the key leaders in the conflict.
"President Trump made it clear to President Erdoğan this incursion is widely unpopular in the United States, greatly destabilizing to the region, is putting in jeopardy our successes against ISIS, and will eventually benefit Iran," Graham said.
In a series of tweets Monday, Trump defended his gamble that pulling US forces out of Syria would not weaken US security and credibility. He took sarcastic swipes at critics who say his Syria withdrawal amounts to a betrayal of the Kurds and plays into the hands of Russia.
"Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte," he wrote. "I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!"
Trump has dug in on his decision to pull out the troops, believing it fulfills a key campaign promise and will be a winning issue in the 2020 election, according to White House officials. He has said he aims to extract the US from "endless" wars in the Middle East.
This has effectively ended a five-year effort to partner with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group. Hundreds of IS supporters escaped a holding camp amid clashes between invading Turkish-led forces and Kurdish fighters, and analysts said an IS resurgence seemed more likely, just months after Trump declared the extremists defeated.
Trump spoke about the IS detainees in a phone call Monday with Kurdish General Mazloum Kobani. Pence said Mazloum assured the president that Kurdish forces would continue to support the prisons holding IS fighters.
New front line
In a speech during a visit to Azerbaijan, Monday, Erdoğan said: "We are determined to continue the operation until the end, without paying attention to threats."
"Our battle will continue until ultimate victory is achieved," he added.
The Turkish Defense Ministry said 560 militants had been "neutralized" since the operation began. Earlier, Erdogan said 500 militants had been killed, 26 surrendered and 24 were wounded so far.
The US exit leaves Turkey and Russia, as well as Iran, Assad's main Middle East ally, as Syria's undisputed foreign power brokers. Ankara and Moscow both predicted they would avoid conflict in Syria, even as the front line between them will now spread across the breadth of the country.
"There are many rumors at the moment. However, especially through the embassy and with the positive approach of Russia in Kobani, it appears there won't be any issues," Erdoğan said when asked about the prospect of confrontation with Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the suggestion that Russia could clash with Turkish forces. "We wouldn't even like to think of that scenario," he said.
Kobani, on the Turkish border, is one of the first Kurdish-held cities where reports emerged of possible Syrian government deployment.
American troops consolidated their positions in northern Syria on Monday and prepared to evacuate equipment in advance of a full withdrawal, a US defense official said.
The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said US officials were weighing options for a potential future counter-IS campaign, including the possibility of waging it with a combination of air power and special operations forces based outside Syria, perhaps in Iraq.
The hurried preparations for a US exit were triggered by Trump's decision Saturday to expand a limited troop pullout into a complete withdrawal.
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Monday he would travel to NATO headquarters in Brussels next week to urge European allies to impose collective and individual "diplomatic and economic measures" against Turkey – a fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally – for what Esper called Ankara's "egregious" actions.
Esper said Turkey's incursion had created an unacceptable risk to US forces in northern Syria, and "we also are at risk of being engulfed in a broader conflict."
The only exception to the US withdrawal from Syria is a group of perhaps 200 troops who will remain at a base called al-Tanf in southern Syria near the Jordanian border, along the strategically important Baghdad-to-Damascus highway. Those troops work with Syrian opposition forces unrelated to the Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.
Thousands of fighters from a Kurdish-led force have died since 2014 battling Islamic State in partnership with the United States, a strategy the Trump administration had continued after inheriting it from his predecessor, Barack Obama.
"After the Americans abandoned the region and gave the green light for the Turkish attack, we were forced to explore another option, which is talks with Damascus and Moscow to find a way out and thwart these Turkish attacks," senior Kurdish official Badran Jia Kurd said. Jia Kurd described the new arrangement with Assad's forces as a "preliminary military agreement," and said political aspects would be discussed later.
It remains to be seen how the Kurds will be treated now. Kurdish fighters began carving out autonomous rule in Syria's northeast early in its eight-year-old war, benefiting from diversions of Assad's military to fight elsewhere. Assad aims to restore his government's authority across all of the country.
Senior Kurdish politician Aldar Xelil called the pact with Damascus "an emergency measure." "The priority now is protecting the border's security from the Turkish danger."
Esper said the US withdrawal would be done carefully to protect the troops and to ensure no US equipment was left behind. He declined to say how long that might take.
EU countries have threatened to impose sanctions on Turkey over the assault. But at a meeting on Monday, they agreed not to impose an embargo. Member countries would instead consider their own restrictions on sales of weapons, a measure likely to be brushed off as trivial, as arms account for just 45 million euros ($51 million)out of more than 150 billion euros ($165 billion) in Turkey-EU trade.
