Days later, Ankara launched the two-pronged Syria operation with the stated aim of clearing the border area of both IS and the Kurdish fighters.
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On Sunday, Turkish forces ramped up their offensive against pro-Kurdish forces near a town wrested back from IS this week by Turkish-backed Arab rebels.
Ankara said its raids had killed 25 Kurdish “terrorists” and that the army was doing everything it could to avoid civilian casualties.
Aided by US-led coalition airstrikes, the YPG has been the most effective group so far in restricting the advance of IS in Syria.
The strikes took place on Sunday in northern Syria, where Turkey and allied Syrian rebels are fighting Kurdish-allied militias.
A spokesman for the autonomous Kurdish region in Syria said on Monday that local military forces in the Syrian cities of Manbij and Jarablus are being reinforced, but not by Kurdish YPG militia.
A captain with the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels said the aim was to push the YPG back to the east bank of the Euphrates river, a position the United States has agreed they should occupy.
Sunday’s airstrikes came on the fifth day of Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield, a military effort to improve its border security by crossing into Syria to pound Islamic State and Kurdish militant positions.
Turkish air strikes and artillery attacks have killed at least 40 civilians, and wounded dozens more, according to a group monitoring the Syrian war.
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the DC-based Middle East Institute, said: “We’re now seeing US-supplied weaponry being used by both sides to fight each other”.
There was no immediate comment from USA officials about the escalation of fighting between the two sides, both of which receive American military support, the WSJ said.
“For president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, PKK, YPG, ISIL are just different facades of the same group”, said Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Gaziantep on Turkey’s border with Syria.
Colonel Ahmed Osman, head of the Turkish-aligned Sultan Murad rebel group, said the force was “certainly heading in the direction of Manbij” and hoped to take it. But, so far Kurdish forces appear to have borne the brunt of Ankara’s incursion as it seeks to stop the Kurds controlling a swath of territory along its border.
On Saturday, there were reports that suspected Kurdish militants fired four rockets at Diyarbakir Airport in southeast Turkey.
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There were no casualties and Diyarbakir governor Huseyin Aksoy said there was no disruption to flights.
