In what has to be one of the strangest, and, sadly, most necessary joint statements ever issued, the chairs of the Foreign Affairs committees for the U.K., France, Germany, the European Union, and the U.S. House of Representatives have all come together to patently condemn the actions of Donald Trump and Recep Erdoğan in Syria.
After first giving the Turkish dictator the green light to conduct an immediate invasion into Kurdish territory in a private phone call, Trump sent Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo to Istanbul, where, after four hours of negotiation, they made it absolutely official: Erdoğan issued an ultimatum that the Kurds had 120 hours (and counting) to get out of their homeland or be killed. That, declared Trump, was a “great” result that no one else could have managed. He’s likely right about that—unless that someone else was also a self-centered narcissist incapable of feeling empathy or listening to reason. Or, in the words of Trump, a fool.
Trump put the cherry on top of his genocide sundae with a series of Friday tweets and genuinely bizarre statements in which he declared his support for an “ultimate solution” while declaring that the U.S. had “control of the oil in the Middle East.”
We, the Chairs of the Foreign Affairs Committees of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the European Parliament, and the House of Representatives of the United States of America jointly condemn in strongest terms the Turkish military offensive in north eastern Syria. …
We consider the abandonment of Syrian Kurds to be wrong. The Syrian Democratic Forces, our partner in the Global Coalition, contributed to the successful yet unfinished fight against Da’esh in Syria and incurred heavy losses by doing so.
We deeply regret the decision of the President of the United States to withdraw American troops from north eastern Syria, which marks another landmark in the change of American foreign policy in the Near and Middle East.
The statement also suggests that, far from fighting terrorism, the joint action by Trump and Erdoğan is likely to increase it.
In a second joint statement, 28 leaders of European Union nations said that the military operation in Syria "causes unacceptable human suffering, undermines the fight against Da'esh and threatens heavily European security." That last concern is one that would likely make Trump laugh, as he has already threatened to shovel released ISIS prisoners toward the EU.