Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in parliament.
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“We want a ground operation with our worldwide allies”, said a senior Turkish official.
“There is not going to be a unilateral military operation from Turkey to Syria”, the unnamed official told reporters in Istanbul.
The PYD and YPG are affiliated to the PKK, which has been fighting an armed insurgency against Turkey since 1984 and is recognized as a terror organization by both the European Union and U.S. The DHKP-C is a far-left terror group outlawed by Turkey and the West.
The UN Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, held talks with Syria’s foreign minister on Tuesday aimed at securing a cessation of hostilities and said Damascus had a duty to let the world body bring in humanitarian aid. “But we could not see any tangible effect of the airstrikes on Daesh, on the contrary, they [the airstrikes] have simplified the group’s job in Syria”, Yilmaz said. The U.N. later announced the government of President Bashar Assad has approved access to seven such areas across the country and that convoys would head out in the coming days.
“It is not clear what the Turkish government seeks, calling for a ground operation in Syria”.
Russian Federation on Tuesday denied its warplanes carried out strikes on a Syrian hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders that killed at least nine people, as Syrian government forces and a Kurdish-led coalition advanced amid heavy fighting in the country’s north.
Syria’s state news agency SANA and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday that government forces took the villages of Ahras and Misqan in the northern province of Aleppo. “If there is a consensus, Turkey will take part”, Reuters cited a Turkish official, who refused to be named in order to speak more freely.
The UN Security Council is “concerned” about Turkey’s shelling of Kurds in Syria, UN diplomats said after a meeting requested by Russian Federation on February 16. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
They said dignitaries from northern Aleppo are trying to negotiate an agreement whereby the insurgents would surrender Marea in exchange for a safe corridor to the town of Azaz, near the border with Turkey. It’s unclear if Assad has an incentive to halt the fighting-even temporarily. They are taking advantage of the chaos to advance and try to link the two enclaves they control to the east and west. They have advanced eastward from Afrin and from the west to the edge of Azaz, triggering alarm in Ankara, which responded with artillery on Kurdish positions.
Over the weekend, State Department spokesman John Kirby urged both Turkey and the Syrian Kurds to focus on the “common threat” of the Islamic State instead of attacking each other. Three children and a pregnant woman were among the dead in Azaz.
Separately, members of the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of Arab and Kurdish groups, captured the major town of Tel Rifaat, one of the largest militant strongholds in Aleppo.
Turkey on Monday separately accused Russian Federation of “an obvious war crime” and warned that there would be consequences if Russian Federation did not immediately end such attacks.
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The Kremlin spokesman added that Moscow prefers to rely on “first-hand sources” of information, which he said in this case would be the Syrian government.
