Pentagon said on Friday that “US Special Operations Forces have been approved to accompany Turkish and vetted Syrian opposition forces as they continue to clear territory” from ISIS.
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USA special operations forces were immediately kiched out of the Syrian town of al-Rai near the Turkish border on Friday by anti-government rebels, according to video footage released online.
The rebel fighters backed by Turkey turned their immediate focus to pushing back Kurdish forces, which are also United States allies.
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who has written widely on Syrian rebel groups, told Foreign Policy Friday that fighters from Liwa al-Mutasem accompanied the Americans out of town, then escorted them back in after Turkish officials told the other Free Syrian Army rebels to stand down. The militia has been the most effective US partner in fighting the Islamic State in Syria.
“Washington should think about who it would prefer controlling large parts of the country – the Turkish-backed “moderate” groups that just threatened to massacre USA troops sent to help them, or the Kurds and their multi-ethnic and multi-religious allies in the Kobane, Jezira and Afrin”, Romano told ARA News.
Erdoğan claimed that Turkish forces had already rid almost 347 square miles of Syria of “terrorist groups”.
Turkey, which hosts about 3 million refugees from Syria’s civil war, has long advocated the establishment of a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border to help contain the human flight and stop deadly rocket attacks by Islamic State on Turkish towns.
Maduro held “positive discussions” with fellow members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) who attended the Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, he said on Sunday at a press conference following the event, in which 15 heads of state gathered in the South American country. These words of the Pentagon’s spokesman Marine Maj. The Department of Defense says this mission marks the first time they’ve embedded with Turkish units.
“Jarablus and al-Rai have been cleansed, now we are moving towards al-Bab…” Turkey is a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally of Washington’s, but it has been angered by US support for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
Meanwhile, the moderate opposition FSA forces also managed to take control of the Tatimus and Kunah Tira regions, which lie west of al-Rai, a town that has been heavily contested between the FSA and DAESH since March. He reportedly added: “As soon as the coalition commanders were advised by the Russian command in the region that Syrian forces had been affected, that sortie was discontinued”.
As ISIS is feeling renewed pressure from the Turkish and American-backed rebels, Washington’s air war has claimed another terrorist leader.
The Peshmerga Twitter account, @KURDISTAN_ARMY, has more than 20,000 followers and routinely shares battlefield updates about the conflict in Iraq and Syria.
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Stressing that, “All parties must respect the new cessation of hostilities”, Pinheiro said, “As if not dramatic enough, in early September the situation in Aleppo was worsened by the cutoff of the last of only two access roads to the city, which effectively amounts to the besiegement of 275,000 civilians”.
