Turkish forces’ advance raises fears of ‘new Ghouta’
British volunteer fighter issues warning as civilians in Kurd-majority city brace for upsurge in fighting
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. Turkey was poised to enter the Kurdish-majority city after advances in recent weeks took them to within a mile of its limits.
There were fears for the 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 Jan 20 against the YPG, which controls the Afrin region in north-west 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 Uk-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Some 340 Syrian rebels have also been killed, as well as 42 Turkish soldiers.
Pro-kurdish groups held protests in Britain on Sunday, 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 early-morning bomb blasts any more.” Janson is one of three Britons among dozens of international volunteers fighters in Afrin, including Huang Lei from Manchester and Dan Smith, a combat medic.
The latest moves will aggravate tensions between Turkey and the US, which has urged Ankara to halt its offensive against its Kurdish partner forces, their most reliable ally in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
A Western diplomat said Turkey had told its Nato allies that they 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 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 since 2011.
About 85 per cent of the dead were civilians killed by the forces of the Syrian government and its Russian patron. The onslaught continued yesterday in Eastern Ghouta, where some 1,100 have been killed in three weeks.