Centre run by US and Turkey to manage buffer zone along Syria border to open

A joint Turkish-United States operations centre to establish and manage a safe zone in north-east Syria will be fully operational next week.

Turkey and the US agreed last week to set up the centre for the proposed zone along Syria’s north-east border but gave few details, such as the size of the zone itself or the command structure of forces that would operate there.

This week a US delegation visited Turkey to work on getting the centre started, and Turkish drones began carrying out work in the area where the safe zone will be created.

“The joint operation centre will start working [at] full capacity next week,” Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar was quoted as saying by Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu news agency on Friday.

Mr Akar said that Turkish and US officials agreed that Syrian Kurdish YPG militia fighters should be removed from the area and that their heavy weapons should be taken.

The US and Turkey have been at odds over plans for north-eastern Syria, where the YPG formed the main part of a US-backed force which fought against ISIS.

Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and the Syrian offshoot of its own outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Ankara.

“There has been certain progress. It marks a good start. There are still things to be done, the efforts will continue,” Mr Akar said.

Ankara and Washington also agreed in general terms about control and co-ordination of airspace in the region.

Last Monday, retired US general Joseph Votel, the former chief of American troops in the Middle East, publicly opposed Ankara’s control of such a zone. In an opinion piece published on The National Interest’s website, Mr Votel, who headed the US Central Command until last March, said that a Syrian security zone controlled by Turkey would “create more problems for all parties involved”.

“Safe zones are generally established to protect people in conflict zones and are usually designed to be neutral, demilitarised and focused on humanitarian purposes,” Mr Votel wrote in the article with George Washington University Turkey expert Gonul Tol.

“Imposing a 20-mile-deep [30 kilometre] safe zone east of the Euphrates would have the opposite effect – likely displacing more than 90 per cent of the Syrian Kurdish population, exacerbating what is already an extremely challenging humanitarian situation and creating an environment for increased conflict,” they wrote.