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| Turkey-Kurd Conflict ‘Has Nothing to Do With Us,’ Trump Says | Turkey-Kurd Conflict ‘Has Nothing to Do With Us,’ Trump Says |
| (30 minutes later) | |
| WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday distanced the United States from the conflict between Turkey and America’s Kurdish allies in Syria, saying that the battle “has nothing to do with us” as he defended his decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria. | |
| Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters alongside the visiting president of Italy, said the American soldiers he had ordered to pull back were not in harm’s way and that “they shouldn’t be as two countries fight over land.” | |
| “That has nothing to do with us,” Mr. Trump said, all but washing his hands of the Kurdish fighters who have fought alongside American troops against the Islamic State for years but have now been left to fend for themselves. “The Kurds know how to fight, and, as I said, they’re not angels, they’re not angels,” he said. | |
| The president’s comments came as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s new national security adviser, were preparing to fly to Turkey in a bid to persuade President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pull back his offensive. | |
| Republicans and Democrats alike have denounced the president for abandoning the Kurds, who now are fighting Turkish forces in a chaotic battlefield that also has put at risk American troops pulling back from the Syrian border with Turkey. Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the small American force from the border, where they had served as a kind of trip wire deterring Turkish aggression, has been widely criticized as a signal permitting Turkey to launch its offensive. | |
| Mr. Trump insisted his handling of the matter has been “strategically brilliant” and minimized concerns for the Kurds, implying that they allied with the United States only out of their own self-interest. “We paid a lot of money for them to fight with us,” he said. | |
| He dismissed concerns that his decision has opened the way for Russia, Iran and the Syrian government to move into the abandoned territory and reassert their influence in the area. “I wish them all a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said. “If Russia wants to get involved in Syria, that’s really up to them.” | |
| Critics in both parties condemned the president’s approach. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said that by sending Mr. Pence and Mr. Pompeo to Turkey, Mr. Trump was trying to fix a problem of his own creation. | |
| “It’s very hard to understand why it is the vice president and secretary of state and others are going to talk with Erdogan and Turkey,” Mr. Romney told reporters. “It’s like the farmer who lost all his horses and goes to now shut the barn door.” | |
| Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies but a sharp critic of his Syria decision, suggested that the president was wrong to think the current conflict did not matter to the United States. | |
| “I hope President Trump is right in his belief that Turkeys invasion of Syria is of no concern to us, abandoning the Kurds won’t come back to haunt us, ISIS won’t reemerge, and Iran will not fill the vacuum created by this decision,” Mr. Graham wrote on Twitter. | |
| “However,” he added, “I firmly believe that if President Trump continues to make such statements this will be a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.” | |
| This is a developing story. Check back for updates. | This is a developing story. Check back for updates. |