Jarablus sits on the northeastern edge of a rectangle of Syrian territory some 80 km (50 miles) long, seized by Islamic State as it carved its self-declared caliphate out of a swathes of Syria and Iraq.
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Ankara considers the YPG an extension of the outlawed PKK, which is fighting the Turkish state.
“Daesh and the Kurds are the same”.
“Nobody can expect us to allow a terror corridor on our southern border”, Erdoğan said, referring to DAESH, the YPG and the PKK.
Hiltermann said that when he traveled to northern Syria this year, he was asked this question, over and over, from the Kurds: “What do you think the Americans will do when Raqqa is taken?”
Turkey launched a cross-border offensive into Syria in late August, saying it had a dual aim of driving away jihadists and ensuring Kurdish forces did not fill the void that was left by extending their control of territory along Turkey’s border.
Washington said the offensive by its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally risked undermining the fight against Islamic State because it was focusing on Kurdish-aligned militias.
“We promise our people and our fighters, that we will hold these terrorists accountable for their evil deeds against our imprisoned fighters”, the Kurdish leadership said an earlier statement. “There were so many prohibitions, no smoking, women couldn’t show their faces”, he said, speaking Turkish and describing life under the jihadist group. It gave no details on the targets, but the villages were in an area still held by Islamic State. In fact, such a direct method of dealing with those terrorist groups will not only eradicate terror in Turkey, but also significantly influence the future of the Syrian civil war.
Jarablus had been under Islamic State rule for three years and its black and white murals can still be seen on the walls.
Bread and drinkable water are in short supply in the once-thriving trading town and there is little sign of commercial life. Children play again in dusty streets, their hair matted with sweat and dirt, while women hang laundry outside buildings on the edge of town, some of them half-destroyed. The Turkish President told a supportive crowd that “operations against terrorist organisations will continue until the end”.
Even though the United States has funneled weapons to the Syrian Kurds and provided them with military training, it has not established ties to the militia’s political wing, the Democratic Union Party, because of Turkish concerns.
Delaying it was the YPG’s position as the most powerful US ally on the ground in Syria.
The Syrian Kurds used the military effectiveness of their 50,000 fighters (these are their numbers, which may be exaggerated) and the massive destructive firepower provided by the U.S. Air Force to overrun much of the northeast of Syria over the last eighteen months.
“Turkish forces will confront them if they are fighting under the banner of terrorist groups, regardless of whether they are members of allied countries, ” told the Middle East Eye. Manbij, like Jarablus, is west of the river. To be fair, what made the Euphrates Shield operation possible was Turkey’s successful reestablishment of diplomatic dialogue.
Ankara has been providing aid to tens of thousands of displaced civilians just inside Syria, effectively a step towards creating a de facto safe zone.
Such a strategy appeared immediately unlikely, he said, but added it could not be ruled out in the longer term. Turkey’s military campaign in Syria saw a renewed push following a suicide attack on Gaziantep that killed 54 people.
“What is happening in Jarablus now isn’t fighting terrorism as Turkey claims – rather it is replacing one type of terrorism with another”, a Syrian government official told SANA last week, calling upon the United Nations to “put an end to this aggression”.
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At the same time, so long as this Kurdish quasi-state exists. the Turkish state is endangered.
