Why evangelicals oppose Trump over Syria

The televangelist Pat Robertson stood by Donald Trump in 2016 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).

“You are giving a rope of survival to this group that you just defeated,” Ishak said.

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But evangelicals were particularly outraged. Others besides Robertson who expressed dismay at the move included former Arkansas Gov. 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.