Ankara announced on early Wednesday that Turkish forces, backed by US-led coalition aircraft, had begun a military operation dubbed Euphrates Shield to clear the Syrian border town of Jarabulus of militants from both Daesh and Syrian Kurdish fighters.
Advertisement
Meanwhile at least 10 more Turkish tanks crossed the border into Syria, after Pro-Ankara Syrian rebels ousted jihadists from the town of Jarabulus in Wednesday’s lightning operation.
Battling IS militants in Syria, the US -backed Syrian Kurds have been able to seize almost the entire stretch of the border with Turkey in northern Syria.
Following heavy bombardment of Jarabulus (a total of 63 targets were fired at 224 times in the first hours) and a series of air strikes involving aircraft from the US -led worldwide coalition, Syrian Free Army (FSA) troops were able to enter the city and take it under control in a matter of hours.
The armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the People’s Protection Units (YPG), have been backed by the United States for almost two years in its war against Islamic State, seizing much of the extremist group’s territory along the Turkish border.
“The US is not going to extradite Fethullah Gulen, who the Turkish government accuses of being behind the coup attempt”, Gareth said, “and the US can not abandon the PYD not least because it doesn’t have another credible partner to work with in Syria”.
But they also aimed to block the advance of Syria’s US-backed Kurdish militia.
Turkey’s defence minister said there was so far no evidence of any withdrawal and Turkey reserved the right to strike the YPG if it failed to move.
But Turkey has been alarmed by the alliance’s success, enabling Kurdish groups to control of land stretching nearly the entire length of the Syrian border.
Erdogan had demanded that the Kurds, linked to a political group accused of committing acts of terrorism inside Turkey, move back across the river and away from his nation’s western border with Syria.
“Of course, we have to protect our borders against the attacks of extremist groups”, Akdag said.
Turkey had been calling on the Kurds to move east of the Euphrates River since a successful US -backed operation to route ISIS in Manbij, a logistics hub for the terrorist group 20 miles from Syria’s border with Turkey located on the western side of the river.
The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) withdrew from the city of Manbij on Thursday, handing control over to the local military council, but the status of other members of the SDF was unclear.
Turkey sees the YPG as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous region in Syria.
As the civil war in Syria rages on, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 11 children were among 15 civilians killed on Thursday in a barrel bomb attack carried out by government forces on Bab Al-Nayrab, a rebel-held neighbourhood in the city of Aleppo.
Later in the day, the Turkish military shelled a group of Syrian Kurdish fighters near Manbij, south of Jarablus, Turkish media said.
“It seems that they might have to ditch the Syrian Kurds in favor of Turkey and they want to continue the cooperation with Turkey”, the analyst said, noting that the “Kurds are redline for Turkey”.
“I don’t think Turkey is ready to let go of the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation partnership just yet”, said Merve Tahiroglu, a researcher on Turkey at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Advertisement
“We are very hopeful that it will be a very short time until we can roll”, Egeland told reporters.
