Putin, Erdogan agree to remove Kurds
WITHDRAWAL OF YPG FIGHTERS FROM SYRIA-TURKEY BORDER BACKS RETURN OF AL ASSAD’S FORCES
Syrian and Russian forces will deploy in northeast Syria to remove Kurdish YPG fighters and their weapons from the border with Turkey under a deal agreed yesterday, which both Moscow and Ankara hailed as a triumph.
The agreement expands on a United States-brokered truce that was set to expire late yesterday and underlines the dizzying changes in Syria since US President Donald Trump announced a US troop withdrawal two weeks ago, ahead of Turkey’s cross-border offensive.
Yesterday’s deal endorses the return of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s forces to the border alongside Russian troops, replacing the Americans who had patrolled the region for years with their former Kurdish allies.
Joint patrol
Under the agreement between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan, the two countries said Russian military police and Syrian border guards would start removing the YPG 30km from the Turkish border today.
Six days later, Russian and Turkish forces will jointly start to patrol a narrower, 10km strip of land in the “safe zone” that Ankara has long sought in northeast Syria.
After six hours of talks with Erdogan in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin expressed satisfaction at decisions he described as “very important, if not momentous, to resolve what is a pretty tense situation which has developed on the Syrian-Turkish border”.
A senior Turkish official described it as an “excellent” deal that would achieve Turkey’s long-held goal of a border strip cleared of the YPG, which Ankara regards as a terrorist organisation because of its links to insurgents inside Turkey.
Last week’s US-brokered deal limited the central part of the border strip between the Syrian towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, where Turkish forces had focused their military offensive.
Under the new deal with Moscow, the length of border that the YPG would be required to pull back from is more than three times the size of the territory covered by the US-Turkish accord, covering most of the area Turkey had wanted to include.
“The outcome of the Putin-Erdogan meeting in Sochi today indicates that Erdogan has become a master of leveraging the US and Russia against each other to maximise Ankara’s gains,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish programme at the Washington Institute said in a tweet.