Kurdish fighters withdraw from town

FIGHTERS WITH the main Kurdish-led group in Syria have evacuated the northern town of Ras al-Ayn, a spokesman said, adding they have no armed presence there any more.

Kino Gabriel, of the Syrian Democratic Forces, said yesterday’s evacuation was part of the agreement to pause military operations against Turkey with American mediation.

The withdrawal of Kurdish fighters from Ras al-Ayn would open the way for them to leave a broader stretch of territory along the Syria-Turkey border, as part of an agreement reached between the US and Turkey.

After the evacuation, the Kurdish fighters will redeploy from a zone 75 miles wide and 20 miles deep between the towns of Ras alAyn and Tal Abyad.

A Turkish soldier has been killed amid sporadic clashes with Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, despite a US-brokered five-day ceasefire, Turkey’s defence ministry has said. The ministry said in a statement that Syrian Kurdish fighters have violated the threeday-old truce some 20 times.

It said the soldier was killed during an observation shift earlier in the day, in an attack by antitank weapons and small arms fire.

It took the death toll among Turkey’s military during its wideranging offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces to seven.

The ministry also said it allowed a 39-vehicle humanitarian convoy to enter Ras al-Ayn. It said the convoy evacuated the wounded and others.

Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish groups terrorists for their links to a decades-long Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants Syrian government forces to move out of areas near the border so up to two million refugees can be settled there, his spokesman said.

Syrian troops have moved in to several locations in north-eastern Syria, invited by Kurdish-led fighters to protect them from Turkey’s incursion.

We are not going to force refugees to go to where they don’t want to go. Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

That has complicated Turkey’s plan to create a “safe zone” along the border where it wants to resettle Syrian refugees now in Turkey. Mr Erdogan’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, said Ankara does not want Kurdish fighters to be able to continue to operate in border areas under control of Russian-backed Syrian forces.

He said Syrian forces should move out of border areas because the refugees “don’t want to go back to areas under regime control”.

He added: “This is one of the topics that we will discuss with the Russians, because, again, we are not going to force any refugees to go to anywhere they don’t want to go.”