However, Turkey’s minister of European Union affairs, Omer Celik, on Wednesday dismissed those reports, while the spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said such a deal was “out of the question”, insisting the Kurdish Syrian militiamen will remain a target for Turkey until they move east of the Euphrates River.
Advertisement
Turkish troops clashed with the US -backed Kurdish Syrian forces around Jarablus to try to halt their advance and form a contiguous corridor on the border between Turkey and Syria.
Turkey says its unprecedented offensive aims to rid the border of both the Islamic State group and the anti-IS Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara also considers a terrorist group.
Last week, Turkey sent tanks across the Syrian border to fight the Islamic State group and to halt the advance of Syrian Kurdish groups affiliated with the PKK.
By Monday, Turkish forces and their rebel allies had advanced to within around 15 kilometers of Manbij, a city west of the Euphrates taken by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from IS earlier this month.
“Ultimately, Syria could yet turn into a territorial extension of the protracted fighting between Turkey and the PKK going on since 1984”, he warned.
Meanwhile, an Islamic State suicide bomber struck Turkish-backed Syrian rebels near the border, causing casualties, according to an opposition monitoring group and an IS-run news agency.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar channel said the explosion wounded four people.
Lebanon has been hit by a wave of explosions over the past three years as Syria’s civil war spilled over into its tiny neighbor.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Wednesday’s attack was carried out by a North African IS member. It said casualties were inflicted but did not give figures.
An uneasy truce between Turkish troops and Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria held on Wednesday, despite Ankara’s vow that it would never negotiate with what it calls a “terror organization”. “We can not turn a blind eye to the rocket attacks fired from bordering towns in north Syria into Turkish soil”, Erdoğan said.
Advertisement
“To suggest it is on a par with a terrorist organisation and suggest there are talks between them, that a deal has been reached between them, this is unacceptable”.
