U.S. President-elect Donald Trump hailed Türkiye’s regional role as a major power and his personal ties with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as he said Ankara would play a key role in the future of Syria following the ouster of Assad regime.
“Turkey is a major force, by the way, and Erdoğan is somebody I got along with great but he has a major military force. And he has not been worn out with war,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “He’s built a very strong, powerful army.”
Trump demurred when asked if he would withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria, but said Erdoğan is “a very smart guy.”
“I think Turkey is very smart. He’s a very smart guy and very tough, but Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can say that Assad was a butcher, here, what he did to children,” he added, referring to ousted Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
Trump said “nobody knows” what future lies ahead for post-Assad Syria, but said he thinks “Turkey is going to hold the key to” the nation.
“Actually, I don’t think you’ve heard that from anybody else, but I’ve been pretty good at predicting,” he said.
Numerous foreign policy analysts and commentators have said Türkiye emerged with a stronger hand from the recent events in Syria.
In Syria, the U.S. has long partnered with the SDF as its primary anti-Daesh partner, over strenuous objections from Türkiye. The group is led by the YPG, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, a designated terrorist group in the U.S. and Türkiye. Washington’s support for the SDF has greatly exacerbated tensions in bilateral relations between the NATO allies.
Since Assad’s fall, clashes have been ongoing between the SDF and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army.
Türkiye reopened its embassy in Damascus on Saturday, two days after its intelligence chief visited the Syrian capital.
Assad fled to Russia after a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) wrested city after city from his control until the opposition reached the Syrian capital.
The collapse of his rule stunned the world and sparked celebrations around Syria and beyond after his crackdown on democracy protests in 2011 triggered one of the deadliest wars of the century.
Erdoğan believes under Trump, Türkiye and the U.S. will get to discuss Washington’s withdrawal from northern Syria and support to the PKK/YPG terrorists in the region.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 to achieve so-called Kurdish self-rule in southeastern regions and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the United States and the European Union. The YPG is its Syrian offshoot that has occupied oil-rich Syrian territories since 2015.
Washington calls the YPG its ally under the pretext of driving out remaining Daesh terrorists, something Ankara considers as support of a threat against its national security. Turkish cross-border airstrikes have targeted the YPG in the region since 2016.
At the time, Trump showed a willingness to address Türkiye’s concerns over the YPG, promising to remove it from the Turkish border area but later failing to do so.
According to his political ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump wants to pull American troops out of northern Syria instead of leaving them as “cannon fodder” if fighting breaks out between other parties.
Erdoğan wants the issue to have a certain framework.