Turkish push against city raises fears of ‘new Ghouta’

SYRIA: Residents of the Syrian city of Afrin were bracing for an onslaught from Turkish troops and allied rebels yesterday, threatening a fresh humanitarian crisis in the war-torn country.

Turkish forces were poised to enter the Kurdish-majority city after advances in recent weeks took them to within two kilometres of its limits.

There are fears for Afrin’s one million civilians, thousands of whom have been displaced by fighting in villages and other cantons closer to Syria’s border with Turkey.

Convoys of activists were reportedly leaving for Afrin from the cities of Cizre in southern Turkey and Kobani in northern Syria in an effort to protect the city by volunteering to put themselves between rebel fighters and the Turks and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Turkey launched ‘‘Operation Olive Branch’’ on January 20 against the YPG, which controls the Afrin region in northwest Syria and which Ankara regards as a terrorist group.

More than 200 civilians and 370 YPG fighters have been killed so far, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

About 340 Syrian rebels have also been killed, as well as 42 Turkish soldiers.

Pro-Kurdish groups held protests in Britain yesterday, calling on the international community to act.

Jamie Janson, a volunteer fighting with the YPG in Afrin, said: ‘‘If the world stands by and continues to do nothing, the devastation you are seeing in Eastern Ghouta today will be Afrin city tomorrow.

‘‘For seven weeks now, Afrin has been bombed and shelled without mercy. People don’t even wake up when windows rattle from earlymorning bomb blasts any more,’’ he said.

Janson is one of three Britons among dozens of international volunteer fighters in Afrin, including Huang Lei from Manchester and Dan Smith, a combat medic.

The latest moves will aggravate tensions between Turkey and the United States, which has urged Ankara to halt its offensive against its Kurdish partner forces, America’s most reliable ally in the fight against Islamic State.

A Western diplomat said Turkey had told its Nato allies that its forces would stop before the city, planning only to secure the border.

‘‘We thought the Afrin offensive was more about Turkey trying to get the US’s attention rather that any serious attempt to take territory in Syria,’’ he told The Daily Telegraph.

The SOHR, which tracks death tolls using a network of contacts inside Syria, published figures yesterday which showed that 511,000 people had been killed in the war since 2011. About 85 per cent of the dead were civilians killed by the forces of the Syrian government and its Russian patron, it said.

The onslaught continued yesterday in Eastern Ghouta, where some 1100 people have been killed in three weeks. – Telegraph Group