U.S. to stop arming Kurdish militia in Syria

YPG fighters in Syria
(Image credit: Delil Souleiman/Getty Images)

The United States will no longer supply weapons to the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, President Trump told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a call Friday. Ankara first announced the promise, and Washington confirmed it hours later without specifying when the change would happen.

The Kurds are U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State, but Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group because of its ties to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought Turkey for years for Kurdish independence or at least autonomy.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.