NBC News’ Richard Engel Calls Out Trump’s Abandonment of Kurdish Allies: ‘Vladimir Putin Became the New Kingmaker of Syria’

NBC News correspondent Richard Engel called out President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pull out US forces from northern Syria and ineffectiveness of the US-brokered ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurds as having greatly empowered Russia’s geopolitical influence in the region.

Reporting from Syria, Engel told Meet the Press Daily’s Chuck Todd that, in the past 24 hours, the ceasefire Vice President Mike Pence negotiated with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week had expired and “almost feels like ancient history because there is now a new dynamic.” A new ceasefire, one negotiated between Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, has taken its place, Engel noted. 

“Vladimir Putin became the new kingmaker of Syria, and President Erdogan and President Putin carved up Syria between them,” Engel explained. “Geopolitically, the U.S. was pushed aside here. President Trump opened the door to Turkey’s invasion, announced he was pulling U.S. troops back from the border and out of this country, making the U.S. presence irrelevant and making previous promises to the Kurds irrelevant. Vladimir Putin presented his terms and those terms are being accepted. The Kurds themselves are very, very worried about their future. They had a promise from the United States, a promise that President Trump broke. Now their future is in Vladimir Putin’s hands and it is not at all certain. So there are still people leaving their homes still worried that they will face a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”

Under the terms of the new ceasefire, Engel added, the Kurds are literally being wiped off the map in parts of Syria where they had been living in an autonomous zone for years.

“Today Turkey and Russia, Vladimir Putin, carved that autonomous zone directly in half with Turkish and Russian troops soon to start patrolling and Syrian troops,” Engel said. “They cut it in half and divided it between them. They redrew the map of the Middle East with no consultation and no concern for what the U.S. was doing because President Trump made his word irrelevant.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.