‘No one wants war’: The morning after TurkeyRussia talks

TURKEY-The presidents of Turkey and Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, have agreed on a deal for Kurdish fighters long a thorn in Ankara’s side - to withdraw from a Turkish-controlled “safe zone” in northeast Syria within 150 hours.

The announcement was made on Tuesday following marathon talks in the Russian southern city of Sochi that went on for more than six hours. Erdogan and Putin have backed opposing sides in Syria’s long-running war. Following the agreement, Ankara and Moscow will run joint patrols east and west of the area, with the exception of the Syrian border city of Qamishli.

Putin, the powerful military ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, called the deal a “momentous agreement for Syria”. The move came just as the US-brokered ceasefire between Turkey and Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria expired with sporadic celebratory gunfire heard across the border in the Syrian city of Ras al-Ain. On October 9, Turkey launched a military operation into northeast Syria, which it said was to drive the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) 32 kilometres (20 miles) from its border. Turkey also wants to build a safe zone for the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it is hosting to return to. Ankara has long considered the People’s Protection Unit (YPG), which largely makes up the SDF, a terrorist group. “If the YPG groups are still located along the border, the operation will restart immediately,” Yusuf Alabarda, a Turkish expert on international security, told Al Jazeera. Alabarda dismissed the role the United States, an SDF ally in its fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), would have in pressuring the Kurdish fighters to adhere to the deal.

“The only guarantee for the YPG to withdraw from the border is not due to US pressure, but from the Turkish forces on the terrain,” he said. “There are no armed forces on the ground that can challenge the Turkish army on its own border.” The safe zone, which Ankara will control, will be a 32km-wide (20-mile) area between the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain, covering a stretch of 120km (75 miles). Turkey initially wanted the length of the safe zone to be 440km (273 miles) but Samuel Ramani, a doctoral researcher in international relations at the University of Oxford, said Turkey had to settle for the more practical option. (Al Jazeera)