Turkey launched an offensive in northern Syria on August 24 to clear Islamic State from its border and to prevent territorial gains by the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara believes has links to Kurdish insurgents fighting on its soil. Three Turkish soldiers were reportedly killed in an ISIS rocket attack on Tuesday, while another died at the outset of the offensive in clashes with the YPG.
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Two soldiers from the Free Syrian Army were also killed and another two injured in the attack.
Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists’ self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey’s prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported. Turkish-backed militia drove ISIS from the border town of Jarablus, but Turkey has also been concerned with checking the advance of Kurdish forces whom it regarded as terrorists.
The Turkish president said that the new military operation will start in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which is also the main stronghold of ISIS in Syria.
“Currently, conflict lines are too insecure for numerous town’s displaced to return safely”, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said in a report last week, referring to Jarablus which had a pre-war population of about 27,500 people. It demands the ouster of “Bashar al-Assad and his clique” within six months and the installation of a “transitional governing body” that would rule the country for 18 months leading up to elections.
He said the operation against IS “could gain some degree of depth” with Turkey still pressing for a no-fly zone on the Syrian side of the border.
However, there have been signs of a rapprochement, with Kalin saying Putin had told Erdogan he fully supported the Turkish operation.
Speaking to reports accompanying him on his return from the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, Erdogan said that U.S. President Barack Obama suggested during a meeting last week, between both parties in China, the possibility of joint military action to control the city of Raqqa.
“There is a big sensitivity of the worldwide community in northern Iraq as it was the case in Bashiqa”, Bilhan said, referring to Turkey’s additional deployment of troops and tanks to the town north of Mosul in December previous year, an episode that had strained relations with Baghdad. Power supplies across Syria have been severely disrupted by the war.
“If what the Russians and the Americans agree upon is very much different from what the Syrians aspire to, then we shall not accept it”, said Riad Hijab of the HNC.
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Another Syrian refugee named Hazune Ali told Anadolu Agency she came to Turkey two years ago as her spouse contributed to the resistance in Syria.
