In a double-pronged approach, Turkish artillery shells on Tuesday hit positions held by the Kurdish YPG militants in the northern Syrian town of Manbij while continuing to target areas held by the IS group in Jarabus, according to local media reports.
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“Our border must be completely cleansed from Daesh”, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in televised remarks, using an Arabic acronym for the ISIS group. An official said the strikes were created to “open a corridor for moderate rebels”.
Jarablus is a vital supply line and the last border point that directly connects the Islamic State group with Turkey and the outside world, and separates Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.
While for Europe and the USA the immediate priority is eliminating Isis and reaching a political settlement in Syria, Turkey’s attention is primarily focused on the Kurds and containing the ascent of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK).
The latest artillery strikes also come after a major terrorist attack on Sunday in Gaziantep, Turkey, where a Kurdish wedding ceremony was blown up by a suicide bomber, killing 54 people, including 22 children. That overshadowed but has not calmed the bloody Kurdish insurgency in the southeast and – as the events in Gaziantep prove – multiple ISIS-linked attacks against Turkey’s Kurdish population.
Authorities were trying to identify the child attacker, who President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said was aged between 12 and 14.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim cast doubt on that, telling the state-run news agency Anadolu as saying it is a “rumour” that the attack was carried out by a child. Moreover, both Erdogan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) and Gulen’s Hizmet movement are moderately Islamic, and so clustering the latter with IS is deeply problematic to say the least, and goes to show Erdogan’s willingness to conflate his enemies without regard to their internal differences. The city hosts many Syrian refugees who fled the war in their home country.
Even before the attempted July 15 coup, Turkey had experienced a year of bloodshed and political turmoil, weathering a string of deadly bomb blasts, blamed variously on ISIS and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK.
“It appears to be an act to punish the PYD”, Ozcan said, referring to a Syrian Kurdish group whose militia is fighting IS.
Ankara is also concerned about the growing power of USA -backed Syrian Kurdish forces, who it says are linked to Kurdish groups waging an insurgency in southeastern Turkey. “One was only 5”.
The blast disproportionately killed women and children, as it had been timed to detonate during a part of the festivities when those groups painted themselves with henna, authorities said.
The bride and groom are believed to have survived the attack, NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports.
The coalition also stressed that it supports both the Turkish-backed rebels that fight against ISIS in al-Rai, and the SDF forces that continue to take control of villages north and south of Manbij.
The bombing also bore the hallmarks of a revenge attack against the Kurds, whose ethnic brethren in Syria have helped inflict significant battlefield losses on Islamic State in that country’s multi-sided war.
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Around 1,500 Turkish-backed Syrian rebels are thought to be in the Turkish town of Gaziantep waiting to attack.
