Pentagon officials are now confirming that, starting today, U.S. special forces are engaged in “advise and assist” operations, embedded with Turkish ground troops at several locations in northern Syria.
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In Syria, Turkey prefers to work with Arab and Turkmen fighters such as those of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is opposed to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime but has also clashed with the Kurds in the past.
Davis did not say how many USA troops are working with the Turks, but others said it was approximately a few dozen.
An individual who appeared to be leading the demonstration shouted, “The collaborators of America are dogs and pigs”. “They want to wage a crusader war to occupy Syria”.
The United States’ new partnership with the Turks and what the Pentagon calls the “Vetted Syrian Opposition” comes as the United States has sought to ease tensions between the Turks and USA -backed Kurdish forces that had been fighting the Islamic State near the Turkish-Syrian border before Turkey’s new offensive.
The episode will be deeply embarrassing to the USA as it struggles with criticism that it lacks a coherent Syria policy.
The operation is also supported by air forces of the anti-IS coalition members.
“We’ve discovered this many times in Muslim world, where the United States deploys its troops, whether it’s Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, it is seen as the enemy, the occupier”, he said.
The move comes just weeks after Turkey launched a blitz operation over the Turkish border, seizing the northern city of Jarabulus and injecting a new dynamic into the five-year-old conflict. The cease-fire, negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, calls for an extraordinarily high level of cooperation and intelligence sharing between the Russian and U.S. militaries; that sharing would theoretically begin after seven days of the cease-fire that started Monday.
The blocking of the aid column is bound up with the security of the road leading from the Turkish border into “rebel”-held eastern Aleppo, which has been repeatedly shelled by the US-backed militias”.
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We weren’t able to immediately verify the source of the videos, but rebel commanders reportedly confirmed the incident. More fundamentally, the USA military brass is focused increasingly on a direct military confrontation with Russian Federation, the world’s number two nuclear power, and sees the ceasefire as cutting across the preparations for such a catastrophic conflict.
