People think because mostly Syria has dropped
out of the front pages that the war is ending.
But in reality that's not really true. We're looking at, basically,
what a lot of people are warning could be another
humanitarian disaster in a war that still isn't really over.
That's partly because it fulfills a campaign promise
that he made in 2016 and he's making again
this year.
[Donald Trump] We want to bring our soldiers
back home. These are the endless wars...
[Bethan McKernan] And it makes Turkey,
which is a NATO ally
and a really strategically important partner in the region,
it makes Turkey happy. The problem is,
the US is leaving behind Kurdish troops on the ground,
who are an American military partner but Turkey sees them as a
terrorist group.
Now that the US have left
the area, that's basically a green light for Turkey
to attack them and potentially open a new
front in Syria's war.
Many of the mid-rank
and high-rank commanders in the SDF have links to
the PKK, which is a guerrilla Kurdish movement that's
been fighting the Turkish state since the 1980s.
And the PKK is recognised by the UK, by the US
as an outlawed terrorist group. So what Turkey says
is that the SDF is the same thing as the PKK,
just with a different name.
With this operation,
Turkey is saying it's going to secure a 32-kilometer
border zone.
What Turkey wants to do
is move up to 2 millions Syrians into this border zone.
But that's not where those people are originally from.
Most of the refugees in Turkey are Arab Syrians, who came
from places like Aleppo, and a little bit from places
like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. What a lot of international
observers are saying, is that moving the Syrian Sunni
Arab population into this area –which is predominantly Kurdish–
amounts to basically demographic engineering.
And it will completely change the structure
of what that part of the country looks like.
Donald Trump has basically handed over
the custody of these 90,000 people
to Turkey but it's very unclear how on Earth
a transfer like that would work.
So there's a really real threat that these 90,000 people
with links to ISIS could go free, could release each other
from the camps, from the prisons,
and you're looking at what could be, you know,
a resurgence of ISIS across Syria.
If it escalates to a level where there is
large-scale fighting between Turkish troops
and between SDF, and ISIS takes advantage of
the chaos, what you're looking at could
potentially be a really ugly situation
for civilians who get caught up in that.