The Turkey-Kurdish fight is yet another complication in the tangled civil war that is ravaging Syria as both Turkey and the U.S. seek to retake territory from Islamic State jihadists by supporting different proxy groups.
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Five years after the start of Syria’s uprising, the Turkish military directly entered the fray last week, sending troops to occupy the northern Syrian town of Jarablus, previously held by the militant group the Islamic State.
On Tuesday, Turkish troops and their rebel allies came under attack in ISIS-held territory to the west of Jarabulus, with the jihadists claiming to have destroyed two Turkish tanks in a missile attack. US officials have also said it has mostly withdrawn its forces to the east of the Euphrates, a natural boundary cutting through northern Syria.
Turkey has launched military incursions inside Syria against both ISIL Takfiris and the US-backed Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), creating a dilemma for Washington.
Turkey sees the YPG as an offshoot of the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is waging a bloody insurgency against security forces in Turkey’s southeast.
“After invading Jarablus city, Turkey tries to cut off the YPG-SDF supply routes in northern Syria and prevent those forces from eliminating ISIS terrorists”, Ali Battal, member of the Syrian National Democratic Union, told ARA News.
Turkey’s incursion into Syria helped rebels take the border town of Jarablus from the Islamic State group last week, but clashes have since broken out between Turkish and Kurdish forces in the area.
The US has always been trying to avert an escalation in violence between Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army forces operating in and around Jarablus and YPG fighters in the same region.
Turkey and allied Syrian rebels have also fought US -backed Kurdish forces known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, around Jarablus.
On Tuesday, the Kurdish-backed Jarablus Military Council said in a statement that it had agreed to a cease-fire following consultations with the US -led coalition leading a fight against Islamic State militants. US officials have since called on both sides to stand down, fearing that the conflict could undermine efforts to battle IS. He says that “if there was an immediate solution, you can be absolutely assured I would be grabbing it with both hands”. “Turkey certainly plays an extraordinarily important role, with their access, basing, overflight, variety of things that they do”. “Likewise we continue to work with our partners in Syria to try and keep the focus where it should be”, he added.
However, Turkey showed no signs of being ready to reach an accommodation with the YPG.
Yunus Akbaba, a spokesman for the Turkish PM Binali Yildirim, said the same applied to Westerners from other nations, including Turkey’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies.
IS said on Tuesday its spokesman Abu Mohamed al-Adnani was killed in the Syrian province of Aleppo, as the USA confirmed a “senior leader” from the group was targeted in the same area.
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But Turkey neither confirmed nor denied the claim, saying only it awaited the fulfilment of a Kurdish promise to the United States to retreat east of the Euphrates river “as soon as possible”.
