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US officials accused Turkey Wednesday of putting US troops at risk after Turkey’s state-owned news agency published the locations of 10 previously secret US military outposts in Syria.
US military officials called the publication a security breach that could endanger US troops, and State Department officials said they’d expressed those concerns to Turkish officials.
“We've raised our strong concerns with publication of this information with senior Turkish government officials, as we do any time we have concerns about risks to US military or civilian personnel,” one official told BuzzFeed News.
The list, published Tuesday by the Anadolu news agency, detailed not just the location of US bases in Syria, but also provided the approximate number of US troops at each location – information the US has to date refused to divulge. It also provided information about French troops posted alongside them. Turkish officials verified the accuracy of the Anadolu list to The Daily Beast.
The report said Anadolu reporters spotted the bases during reporting trips to Syria. The US military said it has not yet determined the source of the information.
US officials privately interpreted the publication as an expression of Turkey’s anger over the US conduct of its war against ISIS, in particular, the US alliance with Kurdish forces that Turkey says are aligned with separatists who’ve been waging a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
The US denies working with the separatists, saying it’s providing support only to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-created force that consists of both Kurdish and Arab fighters but that is widely acknowledged to be led by the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia the Turks say is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, the Turkish separatist movement. The PKK has been designated a terrorist organization by the US, the European Union, and Turkey.
The Anadolu report gave little credence to US assertions about the SDF's independence. “Despite the fact that the militants were given SDF uniforms, some of them wear uniforms with banners of Abdullah Ocalan, jailed head of PKK terrorist organization in Turkey,” the report said.
The US has deployed more than 1,000 US troops across Syria to advise, train and provide artillery and aerial support to the SDF push to capture Raqqa, ISIS’s Syrian capital. US officials stressed that they already have robust security measures in place, but the US military has cited security precautions previously in declining to release details of the US deployment.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnhudson...f-us-troops-in?utm_term=.tmAandOE2#.iggjde3DG
oh not in the article but, they also revealed the location of french and British SF