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Turkey's incursion into Syria has already had a "detrimental effect" on US-led counter ISIS operations, a senior US defense official told CNN.

"They have effectively stopped," the source said of the US campaign against the militant group.

According to the source, Turkey is targeting the US-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) — a key US ally in the war against ISIS. Just hours after Turkey launched its offensive, the SDF said that they had suspended their anti-ISIS operations in order to deal with the attack.

The Turkish operation "has challenged our ability to build local security forces, conduct stabilization operations and the Syrian Democratic Forces [ability] to guard over 11,000 dangerous ISIS fighters. We are just watching the second largest army in NATO attack one of our best counter-terrorism partners,” the source said.

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Did Kurds fight in World War II?

It is unclear whether any Kurds were at the Normandy landings, but there is evidence that some of them fought on the side of the Allied forces during World War II.

Some background: The Kurds, despite being the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, are a stateless and often marginalized people whose homeland stretches across Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Armenia. After World War I, the Allies’ negotiations with representatives of the defeated Ottoman Empire initially involved provisions for an autonomous Kurdistan. But that was abandoned by the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Multiple attempts at greater autonomy or nationhood since then have been suppressed or quashed.

Some of the Kurds who had been pushed out of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey landed in the Soviet Union, said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Kurdish affairs analyst in Washington. So when World War II began, many fought with the Soviets on the side of the Allies. But they were difficult to track because they did not fight under a Kurdish flag.

“They didn’t have a country,” Mr. Civiroglu said. “They didn’t have a navy. They didn’t have anything on their own. But individually, many people came forward.”

Evidence of this has survived in folk songs and books that pay tribute to Kurds who fought in World War II, Mr. Civiroglu said. He also noted that Samand Aliyevich Siabandov — a member of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority — was a well-known Soviet fighter who was lauded in the English-language Russian newspaper Moscow News in 1946.

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President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of virtually all U.S. forces from northern Syria in the face of a Turkish military offensive targeting Kurdish fighters in the region, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Sunday, after days of assurances from the Pentagon that the United States was not “abandoning” its partners in the campaign against the Islamic State.

The defense secretary also cited signs that the SDF is “looking to cut a deal” with the Syrian regime and the Russian government to carry out a counterattack to the north. He said the situation had changed significantly over the previous 14 hours.

“We have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation,” Esper said. “So I spoke with the president last night after discussions with the rest of the national security team, and he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria.”

Trump has downplayed concerns about the crisis for days, saying that Turkey will be responsible for any Islamic State fighters who might break free in the chaos.

On Sunday, he tweeted before departing for his golf course in Virginia that it was “very smart not to be involved in the intense fighting along the Turkish Border, for a change” and accused “those that mistakenly got us into the Middle East Wars” of pushing the United States to stay in the fight.

Trump added that the Kurds and Turks have been fighting for years, a reference to a decades-long Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.

The order to remove the troops came toward the end of a chaotic day in which the viability of the U.S. mission in Syria rapidly unraveled after Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel proxies advanced deep into Syrian territory and cut U.S. supply lines.

U.S. troops were forced to abandon a base in the town of Ain Issa on Sunday morning as the Turkish-led forces approached, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The Turkish-backed fighters seized control of the nearby highway, establishing checkpoints and severing the main U.S. supply line to the western portion of territory held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led alliance that helped the United States defeat the Islamic State.

Hundreds of Islamic State-affiliated foreigners escaped from a camp for women and children in the town as guards fled heavy shelling. Late Friday afternoon, there were reports that a prison housing foreign and local Islamic State fighters was ablaze. The fate of the fighters was not known.

Trump ordered the withdrawal of the about 1,000 U.S. troops left in northern Syria late Saturday. The president made the decision after indications that Turkey intends to expand its attack “farther south than originally planned and to the west,” Esper said, speaking on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

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Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who led the Pentagon through the first two years of the Trump administration, warned during an exclusive interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" that the president's decision to pull troops from Syria's border in advance of a Turkish incursion could have dire consequences and lead to ISIS's resurgence.

"We have got to keep the pressure on ISIS so they don't recover," Mattis said in response to "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd's question on whether the United States would regret Trump's decision.

"We may want a war over; we may even declare it over. You can pull your troops out as President Obama learned the hard way out of Iraq, but the 'enemy gets the vote,' we say in the military. And in this case, if we don't keep the pressure on, then ISIS will resurge. It's absolutely a given that they will come back."

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A day before, Trump defended his decision by stating on Twitter that he was "trying to end the ENDLESS WARS."

"Turkey has been planning to attack the Kurds for a long time. They have been fighting forever. We have no soldiers or Military anywhere near the attack area. I am trying to end the ENDLESS WARS," the president said.

Trump said in an additional series of tweets that the United States had "defeated 100% of the ISIS Caliphate."

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Trump has tried distancing the US from the bloodshed in Syria, chalking it up to a messy foreign war the US can ill afford to be drawn into. At the same press conference, Trump said the battle between Kurdish forces and the Turkish military had "nothing to do with us," The New York Times reported. Turkey rejected calls to end hostilities.

The sudden US pullout has been particularly chaotic. Brett McGurk, Trump's former presidential envoy for the US-led coalition against ISIS, said in a tweet: "US personnel have been scrambling to evacuate positions surrounded by hostile Turkish-backed opposition forces. They are evacuating under duress and then bombing positions so nobody can seize them."

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The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to condemn President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northeastern Syria, clearing the way for Turkey’s offensive against U.S.-allied Syrian Kurds.

The vote was 354 to 60 for the resolution, as dozens of Trump’s fellow Republicans joined the majority Democrats in favor.

The vote underscored deep unhappiness in Congress over Trump’s action, which many lawmakers view as abandoning Kurdish fighters who had been fighting alongside Americans to defeat Islamic State militants.

They also angrily denounced the release from prison of Islamic State fighters since Turkey’s offensive began a week ago.

“That was a betrayal of our partners. It was a gift to Russia, a gift to Iran, a gift to ISIS (Islamic State) and a gift to (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad,” said Representative Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who sponsored the resolution.

Separately on Wednesday, congressional and committee leaders from both parties were meeting with Trump at the White House to discuss his Syria policy.

The resolution backed by the House opposes Trump’s decision to remove the troops and calls on the his administration to present a “clear and specific plan for the enduring defeat of ISIS (Islamic State).

It also calls on Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to immediately end the offensive, seeks continued U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish communities through humanitarian support and also calls on the United States to work to ensure that Turkey’s military acts with restraint.

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Congressional Democratic leaders offered a remarkable readout of a meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying that the President called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a "third-rate politician" in what they described as a "meltdown."

"He was insulting, particularly to the speaker. She kept her cool completely, but he called her a third-rate politician," Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told reporters, describing the interaction. "This was not a dialogue, it was sort of a diatribe. A nasty diatribe, not focused on the facts."

Pelosi added, "What we witnessed on the part of the President was a meltdown, sad to say."
The Democratic leaders were at the White House for a meeting on Syria, which came shortly after the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan vote on a resolution opposing the Trump administration's troop withdrawal.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, the top congressional Democrats said that they walked out. Schumer said they did so "when he started calling Speaker Pelosi a third-rate politician."
Pelosi later said that Trump had actually referred to her as a "third-grade politician."

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White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham described the meeting differently, saying in a statement that Trump was "measured" and "decisive" and that Pelosi "had no intention of listening."

"The President was measured, factual and decisive, while Speaker Pelosi's decision to walk out was baffling, but not surprising," Grisham said. "She had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues. While Democratic leadership chose to storm out and get in front of the cameras to whine, everyone else in the meeting chose to stay in the room and work on behalf of this country."

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President Trump on Wednesday fired back at close ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) over Graham's criticism of Trump's withdrawal from Syria, arguing the senator should focus on investigating the 2016 election instead of the Middle East.

"Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years with thousands of soldiers and fighting other people's wars. I want to get out of the Middle East," Trump said at a joint press conference with the Italian president.

Trump said Graham should focus on his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of corruption during the 2016 election involving Obama administration officials. The president suggested he look into former President Obama, former CIA Director James Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and others, alleging without evidence that they acted corruptly in the lead-up to his electoral victory.

"That’s what Lindsey ought to focus on," Trump said. "That's what the people of South Carolina want him to focus on."

"The people of South Carolina don't want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, over Syria," Trump added. "Let them fight their own wars."

The senator dug in upon hearing of Trump's criticism, tweeting that he will "NEVER be quiet" on matters of national security.

"The worst thing any Commander in Chief can do is to give land back to the enemy that was taken through blood and sacrifice," Graham tweeted. "I fear those are the consequences of the actions being taken right now."