On Friday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Chris Wallace, anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” questioned the Trump administration’s ceasefire in northern Syria between Turkish military forces and Kurds.
Wallace said, “The bigger question is this a cease-fire, or a surrender that has been negotiated by the U.S.? The reason I say that is that the buffer zone that people talk about here, I don’t think most folks really fully understand what the U.S. has negotiated with the Turks is that the Kurds would pull back 20 miles deep from the Turkish border in Syria but 280 miles wide. This is an enormous area that hundreds of thousands of Kurds have lived in for generations. Under the terms of this deal, even if the deal holds, all of those Kurds would have to pull back from that area. Where would they go? How would they live? All of that is unstated. So that’s one of the reasons that you hear that the head of the Kurdish forces who are our allies in the fight against ISIS is talking about a retreat as a tactical maneuver but not a permanent maneuver. They don’t want to move out of what has been their homeland for a long period of time.”
He added, “There is also another big question. This is a deal between the Turks and the U.S. and apparently the Kurdish army agreeing to pull back for a while. You’ve also got the Turkish-backed militia who have been conducting most of the worst atrocities involved in the fighting right now and also the ones involved in the execution of civilians in the Kurdish area of northern Syria. So there are an awful lot of questions about this cease-fire. Is it going to hold. Is it going to work? For how long will it hold? And what happens to the region when you take an area 280 miles wide, 20 miles deep and say the people living there for generations have to leave? Is the Syrian army going to agree to that? The Assad forces? Their backers in Iran and Russia? What happens to ISIS? There are more questions than answers after this cease-fire has been agreed to.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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