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One week after President Trump’s explosive decision to clear the way for a Turkish military assault against America’s longtime Kurdish allies in Syria, many of the most dire predictions about the fallout have already come to pass: Turkey has invaded, displacing more than 130,000 people near Syria’s northeastern border; hundreds of ISIS prisoners, taking advantage of the mayhem, have escaped detention camps; and the Kurds, left with nowhere else to turn, have struck an alliance with Syria’s dictatorial president, Bashar al-Assad. “You have given up on us. You are leaving us to be slaughtered,” the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told a senior American diplomat last week, according to CNN.

Who Are the Kurds, and Why Is Turkey Attacking Them in Syria?

“Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests,” writes The Times’s national security correspondent David E. Sanger.

The debate: What is to be done?

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