Turkish leaders have always been concerned over the rapid advance of Kurdish forces fighting ISIS along its southern border, allowing the YPG to take Jarablus would be unacceptable from Turkey’s perspective.
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After seizing Jarablus, the Turkish-backed rebels have advanced up to 10 km south of the border town, rebel sources and a group monitoring the war said.
But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said Kurdish-backed forces opposed by Ankara had gained up to 8 km of ground northwards, apparently seeking to pre-empt advances by the rebels. Turkey is also aiming to contain expansion by Syria’s Kurds, who are also backed by the United States and have used the fight against IS and the chaos of the civil war to seize almost the entire stretch of the border with Turkey in northern Syria.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara said Thursday that US Secretary of State John Kerry had informed the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that the US-backed Syrian Kurdish militias had begun their retreat to the eastern bank of the Euphrates River.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, made clear on Wednesday that the offensive also aims to drive the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia backed by both the US-led coalition and Russian Federation, to withdraw to the eastern bank of the Euphrates river.
The move was viewed with alarm in Turkey, which considers the YPG a wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group that has been fighting an insurgency against the Turkish state for three decades.
Biden said the YPG risked losing USA support if they failed to move to the east, but Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said Thursday that elements of the YPG were still west of the river.
Turkey has launched a major attack to try and take the Islamic State-held Syrian town of Jarablus.
Both the SDF and the YPG are supported by the United States.
Earlier an SDF-affiliated group said Turkish airstrikes targeted its bases and civilian homes south of Jarablus.
“Death to Erdogan and his mercenaries”, said a group known as the council of Aleppo, in a statement shared by the political arm of the Syrian Kurdish militias.
“It sounds simple” to enforce a no-fly zone, Earnest said, but “the work would be intensive to say the least” and “it would be unsafe”.
“Following the ouster of Ahmet Davutoglu, the architect of Turkey’s foreign policy in the last decade, Ankara has recalibrated its Syria policy”. “If this withdrawal doesn’t happen, Turkey has every right to intervene”.
Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria was also meant to contain an expansion by Syria’s Kurds amid the neighboring country’s civil war, now in its sixth year.
“We are in a very serious situation. evidences of crimes have been provided”, he said in a speech in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, near Paris.
Turkey’s assault on Jarablus was partly to ensure that the YPG makes no further gains in northern Syria, which it fears could extend Kurdish control along Turkish borders and fuel the ambitions of its own Kurdish seperatists.
“Late last week, Syrian jets from President Bashar al-Assad’s Air Force bombed Kurdish fighters in northern Syria with United States special operations forces nearby, according to a United States defense official, in another sign of the increasingly complex battlefield in Syria”. The Turkish government also holds ISIS responsible for a series of deadly attacks in the past year, despite rare claims of responsibility from the radical Islamist group.
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While on a visit to Ankara on August 24, US Vice President Joe Biden pledged to withdraw the support of American forces to Kurdish fighters battling terrorists in Syria if they did not comply with Turkey’s request to remain east of the river.
