Turkish army tanks make their way towards the northern Syrian border city of Jarablus on August 24, 2016.
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At dawn tanks crossed the border, followed by pick-up trucks believed to be carrying hundreds of fighters from Turkish-backed factions of the rebel Free Syrian Army. The U.S. -led coalition fighting the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) confirmed Thursday that Kurdish forces had been asked to retreat.
In the Turkish town of Karkamis, near Jarablus, the mayor, Nuh [noh] Kocaaslan, says he sees little chance of IS returning.
The Turkish military launched artillery strikes on DAESH and PYD positions in northern Syria, hitting the targets around 20 times “to open a corridor for the moderate opposition”, another official told Reuters.
The Syrian government has condemned Ankara’s incursion as an “aggression” against the Arab country. After all the intervention is illegitimate in terms of worldwide law. The officials expressed on several occasions their frustration with the discrepancy between the apparent willingness of the Turkish government to send troops into Syria and the reluctance of the Turkish military to endorse the plan. In the history of the Syrian civil war, it is the first example of winning such a large territory in one day.
The French leader urges “the earliest possible resumption of negotiations” over Syria. It is not ruled out that Turkish intelligence used its long-established ties with ISIS to propose that they leave the city without a fight. The offensive forces were almost 10,000 strong, with a considerable part being Western professional mercenaries.
Interestingly, the USA has officially supported the Turkish invasion.
A Turkish official said the ground incursion had been in the works for more than two years but had been delayed by US reservations, resistance from some Turkish commanders, and a stand-off with Russian Federation which had made air cover impossible.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that if YPG forces did not move back east of the nearby Euphrates river, they would take “necessary measures”. The warning by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to the YPG that if it entered the western bank of the Euphrates it would no longer have American support was a clear reassurance from Washington to Ankara that it valued high allied relations with Ankara.
They stated that, unlike the Turks, they were Syrians, in their own land, and were not going to withdraw their troops. Rogue elements in the armed forces were among those involved in the coup. That is something Turkish officials have vowed to prevent, for fear that a new Kurdish entity bordering Turkey in Syria would fuel the independence aspirations of Turkey’s already restive Kurds. “That would be a huge detriment to the anti-IS campaign”, said Chris Kozak, a Syria researcher at the Washington-based Institute of the Study of War, referring to the main USA -backed Kurdish faction fighting IS.
He says that “for now, the withdrawal hasn’t fully taken place”.
This would extend the Syrian Kurdish quasi-state, which the Kurds call Rojava, connecting up to the Kurdish enclave of Afrin north-west of Aleppo. Generally, that satisfies both Damascus and Moscow.
“ISIS is not, and for sure, will never be the issue that Turkey is in Syria for”.
Some “influential” senior personnel within the military linked to the coup held up the operation by coming up with “excuses”, the official said, pointing to Brigadier General Semih Terzi, a prominent alleged plotter who was shot dead on the night of putsch.
On the whole, the emergence of a new military stakeholder in the Syrian conflict exacerbates the problem to a significant degree.
Ankara had in March given the White House a list of “moderate fighters” – 1,800, but with the promise of 600 more – that would efficiently perform the operation, the source said. He is a former associate professor at the Saint Petersburg State University, Department of worldwide.
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Alexander Sotnichenko, Ph.D., is a political analyst, an expert on Turkey and the Middle East.
