The U.S. has designated the Nusra Front as a terrorist group, though some of its members fight alongside U.S. -backed rebels in Syria.
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Washington found itself trapped between two key allies who are bitter foes – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation partner Turkey, and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, also taking part in the war against the Islamic State jihadist group but considered a “terrorist” group by Ankara. “All terrorist organizations have been repulsed and they have gone”, Yildirim said on September 4 during a televised speech while visiting the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.
On Aug. 24, Turkey, along with an estimated 1,000-strong Syrian rebel coalition, then launched its incursion into Jarablus.
With Turkey’s rapid success in less than two weeks, his position looks stronger with territory in between the two Kurdish “cantons” of Afrin and Kobane now in the hands of Ankara-backed rebels.
The Observatory said IS still controls four border villages, adding that once they are taken it will cut the extremist group’s last “link with the outside world”.
The crisis has been a vexing topic of discussion at the G20 meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China, where the United States and Russian Federation, at odds on the question of support for the Syrian regime, continue to work to strike a deal on resolving the conflict.
Ankara fears that advances by the Kurdish YPG militia, which has been one of the most effective partners for the USA coalition fighting IS, will embolden Kurdish militants on its own soil.
Turkish tanks crossed into Syria to the west of a frontier town seized from the Islamic State group last week, in a “new phase” of an operation aimed at sealing off the last stretch of border controlled by the extremists.
The Turkish military responded to the rockets Saturday with howitzers, striking two weapons depots and bunkers and “destroying the locations and the Daesh terrorists there”, the state-run Anadolu news agency said, referring to the Islamic State by an Arabic acronym.
Islamic State used the area, northeast of Aleppo, to bring foreign fighters into its territories in Iraq and Syria.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday said that IS (Daesh) militants “had lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages between the Sajur River. and Al-Rai”.
However, the USA sees the YPG militia as an important strategic part of the US -led anti-IS coalition and has provided them with extensive aid and air strikes.
A Turkish tank heads to the Syrian border.
Some Kurds have criticised Turkey for its role in Syria.
“Ankara will never allow the establishment of a Kurdish “terror corridor” in northern Syria”, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the press on Thursday.
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At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey’s Kurdish-rooted Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an “invasion”. The city of Homs, Syria’s third largest, is largely under government control, with only one neighborhood still held by rebels.
