There is little, if any, possibility that those who are denouncing this troop withdrawal and demanding that U.S. forces protect Syria’s borders (not America’s) indefinitely will listen to reason, but here is some anyway.

“Erdogan’s Jihad Offensive Began Many Months Ago,” by Clare M. Lopez, Center for Security Policy, October 15, 2019:

…Events in the Middle East have unfolded rapidly since Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of areas in northeastern Syria ahead of the coming Turkish invasion that began 9 October with a combined force of armored, mechanized and commando brigades, assorted special forces teams and over 6,000 Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters from various Turkish-backed Syrian rebel groups. Close to a week later, hundreds of Kurdish civilians are dead, thousands more are uprooted and fleeing, and Turkey’s forces continue advancing ever deeper into Kurdish areas, even as Syrian troops head north to confront them. Turkish forces have even launched multiple artillery rounds in the direction of a U.S. Special Operations post near the embattled town of Kobane. In short, utter chaos has ensued.

The Center for Security Policy (CSP) published “Ally No More: Erdogan’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West” in 2018 to sound a warning about where Turkey was headed under Erdogan and AKP leadership. Unfortunately, the Turkish regime’s charm offensive apparently carried more weight with the Trump administration. Despite Erdogan’s claimed intention merely to establish safe zones where thousands of Syrian refugees currently supported inside Turkey would be resettled, in fact his real intent was always a population transfer of those pro-Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis into border areas ethnically cleansed of Kurds. Turkey’s broader ambitions in the region also have long been clear: he and senior Turkish officials have been talking about jihad against the Kurds, Cyprus, Greece, the Balkans and more for at least the last couple of years now. Erdogan’s speeches are replete with references to re-establishment of the Ottoman Empire. In early January 2018, Ismail Kahraman, the Speaker of Turkey’s National Assembly, declared that “without jihad, there can be no progress…” In February 2018, Erdogan spoke openly about his jihadist intent to reclaim lands Turkey once dominated in the days of the Ottoman Empire:

We say at every opportunity we have that Syria, Iraq and other places in the geography in our hearts are no different from our own homeland. We are struggling so that a foreign flag will not be waved anywhere where adhan is recited.

Then, speaking in early September 2019, Erdogan went an ominous step further, declaring that it was “unacceptable” that Turkey can’t have nuclear weapons—and hinted that Turkey may already be working on obtaining a nuclear capability….