Trump Betrayal Is Allowing The Slaughter Of Christians in Syria By ISIS

'It is a zone of death, and we're complicit': Why Evangelicals are upset with Trump's Syria policy

WASHINGTON – When Bassam Ishak heard that Vice President Mike Pence had secured a cease-fire in Syria – one that included protections for religious minorities – he felt a wave of optimism that his family back home would be safe. 

But in the weeks since that deal was announced in Turkey on Oct. 17, Ishak's hometown in northern Syria has nearly emptied, with Christians and Kurds fleeing amid fears of persecution by Turkish-backed militias.

When he announced the cease-fire, Pence emphasized Turkey's commitment to shield religious and ethnic minorities in the region. But Ishak and others say extremist paramilitary groups have not adhered to the U.S.-brokered deal, continuing their attacks and terrifying residents in their path. 

"They are frightened. These are communities who grew up hearing stories about the genocide against their people by Turkey in 1915," said Ishak, who left Syria in 2011 and now lives in Washington.  

He was referring to the Seyfo massacre, the little-known slaughter of an estimated 300,000 Christians by the Ottomans during World War I.

"For them to see this happening is like history repeating itself. This is why they’re fleeing," Ishak told USA TODAY. The 60-year-old Syriac Christian last visited his home in 2018; he now represents the Syrian Democratic Council, the political arm of the U.S-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, in Washington.

Ishak's fears help explain why the unfolding crisis in Syria has sparked such a visceral reaction from Christian leaders in the U.S., prompting some of President Donald Trump's most stalwart defenders to voice outrage over his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeast Syria. Critics say Trump's move gave Turkey the green light to invade Syria and betrayed the Kurdish forces, known as the SDF, America's chief ally in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group.

Now, some predict there will be an "ethnic cleansing" against the U.S.-allied Kurds, as well as the Yazidis and other minorities in northern Syria.

There is not a precise count of the number of Christians living in this region, but some experts put the figure at about 100,000. The region is diverse, with Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis and others living in relative harmony. The SDF, which is also an ethnically mixed force, gained control of this region after the Syrian civil war broke out. Now, however, Turkey has moved in and Syrian government forces, under the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, are also vying for control. 

Trump and other top White House officials have strongly defended the decision to withdraw U.S. troops stationed on the Turkey-Syria border. And they say the cease-fire has mostly held – staving off more severe violence. 

"The Turkish leaders made real commitments to the vice president and me when we were on the ground" in Ankara, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Oct. 30. Pompeo traveled with Pence for the Oct. 17 negotiations with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Pompeo said the Trump administration would continue to monitor the situation and make sure Turkey complies with the agreement. And he said he has not received reports of a genocide in the making.

The administration has also authorized $50 million in assistance for Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in northeast Syria.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment, said the White House has received conflicting reports from inside Syria, and officials are "very aware" of the possibility that targeted violence could spiral. 

"We certainly would not declare an ethnic cleansing right now," this official said. "But we are aware, very aware, of the possibility and have been very clear that that's not something we're willing to tolerate."

The situation in Syria is not just a fraught foreign policy problem. It also has domestic political consequences. If Evangelicals become disenchanted with Trump over his Syria policy, it could cost him dearly in the 2020 election. White Evangelical voters supported Trump by an overwhelming margin in the 2016 election, 80% to 16%, and they have remained deeply loyal amid a cascade of controversies. 

But Trump's decision to withdraw most U.S. forces from Syria opened a rift. Perhaps the most notable criticism came from televangelist Pat Robertson, who slammed Trump's decision and said the president was "in danger of losing the mandate of heaven.” 

"The president, who allowed (Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi to be cut in pieces without any repercussions whatsoever, is now allowing the Christians and the Kurds to be massacred by the Turks,” Robertson said during an Oct. 7 episode of his Christian Broadcasting Network show, the 700 Club.

Others have raised their voices as well. An American Christian missionary in Syria, David Eubank, has been posting near-daily photos and videos on Twitter, displaying the unfolding crisis in real time and pleading for Trump to reverse course.

In an Oct. 30 video, the former U.S. Army  Ranger, describes helping Kurds and Christians who have abandoned their homes in northern Syria.

"It is a zone of death, and we're complicit," says Eubank, the founder of Free Burma Rangers, a humanitarian group that assists ethnic minorities in war zones. "We stepped out of the way knowing and publicly admitting what would happen." 

Trump administration officials have tried to quiet the Evangelical storm, reaching out to leaders privately and publicly.

Victoria Coates, Trump's deputy national security adviser for Middle East and North African affairs, recently went on American Family Radio, to address concerns raised by the show's host Tony Perkins, a powerful conservative Christian leader.  

A spokesman for the Family Research Council, the group Perkins' leads, did not respond to a request for comment. But during his Oct. 22 show, Perkins noted that while the region is predominantly Muslim,  "some of the longest consistent Christian communities in Christendom are there and I think ... it's important that they stay there."

After the U.S.-brokered cease-fire, Turkey and Russia agreed to conduct joint patrols along the Turkey-Syria border. Until Turkey's incursion, that swath of territory had been under Kurdish control, and experts say the Kurds had governed it democratically – giving residents more freedoms than in much of the rest of the region. 

But now, Amnesty International and other human rights groups say Erdogan's government has started deporting Syrian refugees, who fled to Turkey during Syria's ongoing civil war, back into northern Syria – even though many of them came from other parts of the war-torn country.

The Turkish government has argued that the Syrians are voluntarily returning to a "safe zone" they established with their military incursion. But advocates say it is anything but safe, and Amnesty International said it has documented cases of refugees being coerced to return. 

"I believe that we are already seeing the beginning of ethnic cleansing," said Amy Austin Holmes, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative.

"(Erdogan's) plan is to replace those people who have fled with the refugees from Turkey," she said. "It’s a mess basically, and nobody is willing to stand up to Turkey." 

The Trump administration official said the White House supports efforts to repatriate refugees if they are willing. But "we are not supportive" of forcing millions of Syrians to move "to places that they were not originally from."

"We do not have clarity" right now of Turkey's actions and intentions, this person said.

Holmes, who has worked in Syria and recently interviewed Kurdish fighters and Syrian civilians, has highlighted the historic connection to the 1915 Seyfo massacre in interviews with Syriac Christians. 

"We view the Turkish threat as an existential threat against us," Elizabeth Gawyria, a Syriac Christian whose family survived the Seyfo massacre, tells Holmes in a March video posted on Twitter.

"They want to take us from our homeland again," said Gawyria, a political leader in northeastern Syria who recently came to Washington to lobby for U.S. help as her community copes with Turkey's invasion.

Holmes and others hope the pressure, internationally and domestically, will prompt Trump to reverse course and send troops not just to protect Syrian oil fields in eastern Syria but also the Syrian people who live farther north. 

“I think it is morally bankrupt if the U.S. military is used to protect the oil fields, while we allow our allies to be ethnically cleansed by Turkey,” Holmes said.

Eubank was similarly blunt in his Oct. 30 video. 

"We have to get reengaged," he said. And U.S. officials have to stop calling the Turkish-controlled area in northeastern Syria a "safe zone."

Kurds and Christians, he said, are calling it a "genocide zone."

Evangelical Christians Turning Against Trump

Why evangelicals oppose Trump over Syria

 Jerry Adler and Caitlin Dickson

Trump explains again why he pulled troops out of Syria

The televangelist Pat Robertson stood by Donald Trump during the storm over the “Access Hollywood” tape of the Republican candidate boasting about assaulting women, dismissing the remarks as “macho talk.” As recently as last month, he defended Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to discredit Joe Biden, calling the idea of impeachment “absurd.” But this week, finally, Trump did something that “absolutely appalled” Robertson, leading him to warn that the president was in danger of losing “the mandate of Heaven”: He moved a small contingent of American troops from the Syrian-Turkish border, signaling to Turkey that it could begin an assault on territory held by Kurdish guerrillas.

And within days the assault began, with Turkish air and ground forces attacking towns along the border Thursday, tens of thousands of civilians fleeing and a half-million at risk of being caught in the fighting.

Bassam Ishak, president of the Syriac National Council of Syria, an organization that advocates for the rights of Syriac Christians and other Syrian minorities, told Yahoo News he has been receiving photos and videos of the damage caused by Turkish airstrikes in the region once protected by U.S. forces.

“People are frightened and many have already fled the area,” he said, citing reports that estimate over 60,000 people have fled their homes in northern Syria since Wednesday.

Trump’s move, reversing a long-standing American commitment to protect the Kurds, who for the last five years have borne the brunt of the fighting against the Islamic militants of ISIS, drew widespread condemnation across the political spectrum, including from such close political allies as Sen. Lindsey Graham. Critics called it a betrayal, and warned that fighting in the area could allow ISIS to regroup. The Kurds have been holding a large number of captured ISIS fighters, who could escape in the chaos (something Trump said wasn’t a concern to America, since he assumed most of them would go to Europe).

Rev. Pat Robertson in 2015. (Photo: Steve Helber/AP)

But evangelicals were particularly outraged. Others besides Robertson who expressed dismay at the move included Mike Huckabee who tweeted, “I generally support @POTUS on foreign policy & don’t want our troops fighting other nations’ wars, but a HUGE mistake to abandon Kurds. They’ve never asked us to do THEIR fighting-just give them tools to defend themselves. They have been faithful allies. We CANNOT abandon them.”

Among prominent Christian evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress were almost alone in backing Trump’s move.

At first glance, Christian evangelicals wouldn’t seem to have a direct stake in the issue. The Kurds, an ethnic group in a region that encompasses parts of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, are primarily Muslim. There is a considerable Christian population in the affected area of northeast Syria — estimated at around 40,000 by Peter Burns of the Washington-based In Defense of Christians, including members of the Syriac Orthodox church, the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East — but not much evangelical presence either in established congregations or as missionaries.

But there are larger geopolitical issues in play. Turkey’s fraught relationship with the Kurds has long been a source of tension with the U.S. There are around 35 million Kurds spread across the Middle East, a third of them in Turkey. Their long struggle to establish a national state would threaten Turkish sovereignty over a considerable swath of territory, and Turkey considers their formidable guerrilla army terrorists.

Meanwhile the Kurds have earned, and cultivated, an image in the West as loyal American allies against ISIS. They have good relations with Israel, a country which evangelicals fervently support. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose main interest is in countering Iranian influence on his country’s borders, issued a strong condemnation of the Turkish invasion and a warning “against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies.”

“Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people,” he added.

And evangelicals have reason to be wary of Turkey. It is a member of NATO and a key ally of the U.S. during the Cold War, although more recently it has developed warmer relations, including military, with Russia. Trump seems to have a personal bond with the country’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, praising him last year for his promise “to eradicate whatever is left of ISIS in Syria ... and he is a man who can do it.”

But memories are long in that part of the world, and Christians haven’t forgotten the genocide Turkey perpetrated against Armenian and other Christian minorities a century ago, a crime which Turkey has never acknowledged. More recently, Andrew Brunson, an American pastor of a small church in Izmir, was arrested and held in a Turkish jail for nearly two years, allegedly for associating with a banned political movement — a cause célèbre for American evangelicals who lobbied the Trump administration to seek his release through economic pressure. (He was freed and received a hero’s welcome at the White House last year.)

Human rights activists sounded the alarm as soon as Trump announced his plans to pull U.S. troops from the area — apparently without consulting the Pentagon or other advisers, after a phone call with Erdogan. The implication of the move is that “the Christians and Yazidis (another ancient religious minority also targeted for ISIS genocide) are no longer protected,” Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told Yahoo News. “If they don’t flee, they could be killed.”

The almost unanimous criticism apparently took the White House by surprise; Trump tweeted out a warning to Turkey that he could “obliterate” their economy with sanctions if they misbehaved in Syria. As reports mounted of civilian casualties Thursday, Trump tweeted, somewhat inconclusively, that “....We have one of three choices: Send in thousands of troops and win Militarily, hit Turkey very hard Financially and with Sanctions, or mediate a deal between Turkey and the Kurds!

He didn’t say which course he intended to follow, but unless Turkey — which fields the second-largest army in NATO behind the United States — can somehow be stopped, Shea warns that the outcome “could be the final blow to the 2,000-year-old Christian presence in that region, as those communities across the Middle East watch with horror and conclude that there is no place for them in the Middle East, that their only hope for a future is in the West.”