After our April retaliation for Assad’s chemical-weapons attack on Douma, Syria reemerged indirectly, through Turkey’s incarceration of Pastor Andrew Brunson. An apolitical evangelical preacher, he and his family had lived and worked in Turkey for two decades before his arrest in 2016 after a failed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Brunson was a bargaining chip, cynically charged as conspiring with followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic teacher living in America, once an Erdogan ally but now an enemy obsessively denounced as a terrorist. Just after Trump’s return from
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