page_title: Ursula von der Leyen
section_title: International crises
hierarchical_section_title: Ursula von der Leyen / Political career / Federal Minister, 2005–2019 / Minister of Defence, 2013–2019 / International crises
caption_attribution_description: English: Turkish Minister of National Defense Ismet Yilmaz, left, and the German Federal Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyeh sit at the head of a table during a briefing on the future objectives of coalition forces deployed to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, during the German minister’s visit Jan. 21, 2016. Von der Leyeh came to Incirlik AB to visit with German forces deployed here and spoke on the importance of coalition partnership.
context_page_description: Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German politician and the president of the European Commission since 1 December 2019. She served in the federal government of Germany from 2005 to 2019 as the longest-serving member of Angela Merkel's cabinet. She is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its EU counterpart, the European People's Party.
  She was born and raised in Brussels to German parents; her father Ernst Albrecht was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French. She moved to Hanover in 1971, when her father entered politics to become Minister President of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. As an economics student at the London School of Economics in the late 1970s, she lived under the name Rose Ladson, the family name of her American great-grandmother from Charleston, South Carolina. After graduating as a physician from the Hannover Medical School in 1987, she specialized in women's health. In 1986 she married fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen of the noble von der Leyen family of silk merchants.
context_section_description: Within her first year in office, von der Leyen visited the Bundeswehr troops stationed in Afghanistan three times and oversaw the gradual withdrawal of German soldiers from the country as NATO was winding down its 13-year combat mission ISAF. In summer 2014, she was instrumental in Germany’s decision to resupply the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters with lethal assistance. In September 2015, she signalled that she was open to delaying the withdrawal of 850 German soldiers from Afghanistan beyond 2016 after the Taliban's surprise seizure of the northern city of Kunduz. German forces used to be based in Kunduz as part of NATO-led ISAF and remain stationed in the north of the country. She later opposed the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  Following criticism from German officials of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's escalation of the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in August 2015, von der Leyen decided to let Germany's three-year Patriot missile batteries mission to southern Turkey lapse in January 2016 instead of seeking parliamentary approval to extend it. That same month, she participated in the first joint cabinet meeting of the governments of Germany and Turkey in Berlin. By April 2016, under von der Leyen's leadership, the German Federal Armed Forces announced they would commit 65 million Euro to establish a permanent presence at Incirlik Air Base, as part of Germany's commitment to the military intervention against ISIL.
  At the Munich Security Conference in 2015, von der Leyen publicly defended the German refusal to supply Ukraine with weapons. Stressing that it was necessary to remain united in Europe over Ukraine, she argued that negotiations with Russia, unlike with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadists, were possible. Germany sees Ukraine and Russia as a chance to prove that in the 21st century, developed nations should solve disputes at the negotiating table, not with weapons, she said. She also noted that Russia has an almost infinite supply of weapons it could send into Ukraine. She questioned whether any effort by the West could match that or, more importantly, achieve the outcome sought by Ukraine and its supporters.
  On the contrary, von der Leyen said that giving the Ukrainians arms to help them defend themselves could have unintended and fateful consequences. "Weapons deliveries would be a fire accelerant," von der Leyen was quoted as telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily. "And it could give the Kremlin the excuse to openly intervene in this conflict."
  After Hungary used a water cannon and tear gas to drive asylum seekers back from the Hungarian-Serbian border on September 2015, during the European migrant crisis, von der Leyen publicly criticized the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and called the measures “not acceptable and [...] against the European rules that we have."
  Under von der Leyen's leadership, the German parliament approved government plans in early 2016 to send up to 650 soldiers to Mali, boosting its presence in the U.N. peacekeeping mission MINUSMA in the West African country.
caption: Von der Leyen and General Bekir Ercan Van (far left), the commander of Incirlik Air Base, who was accused of complicity in the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt
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