Turkey launches attack on Kurds in northern Syria
TURKEY: Turkey has launched an attack on a United Statesbacked Kurdish militia operating in northwestern Syria, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to ‘‘tear down’’ the group’s border strongholds.
Convoys of Turkish tanks are lining up outside Afrin, a small island of territory in Idlib province controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Ahead of an all-out assault, the Turkish army is pounding the area with artillery.
‘‘Our preparations have been completed. The operation might start at any time, and then will come the turn of other regions,’’ Erdogan said.
The implicit threat against not just Afrin but the swathe of northern Syria controlled by the Kurds – with US military support – could bring two Nato allies into armed confrontation.
The US announced last weekend that it is helping the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition dominated by the YPG, to set up a 30,000-strong border force to protect the area it has captured along its front lines with Turkey, Iraq, and Syrian regime forces.
The YPG, for its part, has promised Turkey a fight. ‘‘ The Kurdish people will rise up as a whole. It will be total warfare,’’ said Saleh Muslim, a former head of the group’s political wing.
An assault on Afrin would be the biggest Turkish operation inside Syria since mid-2016, when special forces soldiers crossed the border to confront Islamic State. That brought the Turkish military and its rebel allies up against USbacked Kurdish forces in the same area, taking two Nato member states to the brink of battle for the first time since the 1974 Cyprus conflict.
The government in Ankara has long railed against Washington’s support for the Syrian Kurds. The YPG is tied to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a leftist militia which is waging a bloody war in eastern Turkey and is listed as a banned terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the European Union.
The US insists that the YPG and PKK are separate entities, however, and has sent 2000 troops to northern Syria to train the SDF. US air strikes have also enabled the Kurds to seize a stretch of northern Syria, including areas that are ethnically Arab.
Kurdish officials have said they will not relinquish any of the territory they have won. Erdogan, however, has grown increasingly pugnacious as it has become clear that the US will not be scaling down its support for the SDF.
Turkey and Russia had agreed to guarantee ceasefires in four deescalation areas, including Idlib. However, that detente is now unravelling. The Syrian army, backed by Russia and Iran, is advancing into the rebel-held areas of Idlib province from the south, sending hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing towards the Turkish border. – The Times