Henri Barkey, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Aykan Erdemir, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, talk with host Carol Castiel about the strategic implications of the US troop withdrawal from Syria, which paved the way for a Turkish incursion and an assault on allied Kurdish forces. This decision, which ceded ground to geopolitical adversaries like Russia, Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Iran, met with bipartisan opposition in the US Congress and stunned allies around the world. It may also have precipitated the resurgence of the so-called Islamic State, which had been contained by joint US-Kurdish efforts.
****NOTE: This program was recorded before ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US led raid.