The operation also includes USA advisers, who are advising the operation from inside Turkey, while American surveillance aircraft are providing overflight intelligence and are poised to contribute US airstrikes if necessary, according to a senior Obama administration official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations.
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A coalition of Turkey-backed rebels were given access to Turkish soil through which to launch an invasion of the ISIS border city of Jarabulus, but what happened was a lot bigger than anyone expected, as the rebels didn’t go alone, but were joined by a significant Turkish military contingent, which invaded along with them.
With the support of US forces, Turkish tanks motored into Syrian territory in the early hours of Wednesday. They also hold parts of the border further west, so if they ever took control of Jarablus, they would control nearly the entire stretch.
Some 1,500 Syrian opposition fighters were involved, said Ahmad al-Khatib, an activist embedded with the rebels.
The Kurds are a sizable ethnic group in the Middle East, inhabiting a territory stretching across what is now Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The offensive, dubbed “Euphrates Shield”, is Turkey’s first major military operation since a failed July 15 coup shook confidence in its ability to step up the fight against Islamic State.
Turkey and the United States hope that by removing Islamic State from the border, they can deprive it of a smuggling route which long saw its ranks swollen with foreign fighters and its coffers boosted by illicit trade.
Turkey wants to show it is serious about taking on IS, which has been blamed for a string of attacks inside the country – the latest a weekend attack on a Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep that left 54 people dead, many of them children.
Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Isik told NTV television there was so far no evidence of any withdrawal and Turkey reserved the right to strike the YPG if it failed to move.
The Kurdish YPG militia, a critical part of the USA -backed campaign against ISIS, took near complete control of Hasaka city on Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear if any Turkish or Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces crossed the border to take part in the operation.
The main Syrian Kurdish party, known as the PYD, has benefited from a tacit non-aggression pact with Assad since the early months of the war, when the Syrian army withdrew from much of northeastern Syria to battle rebels elsewhere in the country, allowing the Kurds to carve out a zone of autonomy.
But the YPG has ties to the Kurdish PKK movement, which the U.S. and the European Union consider to be a terrorist organization and which has waged a deadly insurgency across eastern Turkey since in the 1980s.
In a press conference in Ankara after he arrived, Biden said the U.S.is prepared to drop its support of the Syrian Kurds unless they pulled back from Jarabulus, beyond the Euphrates River, which runs to the east of the town.
IS-held Jarablus is a key lynchpin in the Turkish-Kurdish rivalry. That in turn led the U.S.to scramble aircraft to protect American troops on the ground, in what could have resulted in the first direct U.S. The boom of artillery fire was audible as tanks opened fire from just inside Turkish territory. Turkey is a leading sponsor of the Syrian rebels. The fighters came from the US -backed Hamza brigade, as well as rebel groups fighting government forces in Aleppo, such as the Nour el-Din el Zinki brigade, the Levant Front, and Failaq al-Sham. Redur Xelil, spokesman for the YPG, said the intervention was a “blatant aggression in Syrian internal affairs”.
The advantage for Turkey in putting its “own” groups into this part of Syria is to stop the Kurdish advance in its tracks.
Fighters from the powerful and ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham brigade are also present, he said.
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Karam reported from Beirut.
