QUOTE OF THE DAY
“If you don’t want to get wet, you shouldn’t be waiting under the rain.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, criticizing the U.S. over its continued support for a Syrian Kurdish militia, as Turkey’s military pushes closer to the U.S.-backed coalition in Syria
ANKARA, Turkey — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Turkey’s allies to distance themselves from U.S.-backed Kurdish rebels as his army pushes deeper into Syria to chase away militant groups.
Speaking on Saturday in Istanbul, Erdogan criticized the U.S. over its continued support for Kurdish groups, although he was careful not to identify the NATO ally as the focus of his attack. Earlier, he pledged to continue its operation in Syria’s Afrin region until all members of the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia, leave areas near Turkey’s southern borders.
“They are treading a path according to their own wishes by standing with terrorists and warning that nothing should happen to one of their own,” Erdogan said in the televised speech. “If you don’t want to get wet, you shouldn’t be waiting under the rain.”
Turkey considers the Kurdish militia to be a terrorist group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party that has waged a bloody insurgency within its borders.
Erdogan has vowed to extend the military push to nearby Manbij, where U.S. forces are embedded with Kurds. That possibility has spurred criticism from the U.S., which warned last week that any miscalculation could
result in a direct confrontation between Turkish and American forces.
The U.S. pledged not to provide arms to the Kurdish militants, Erdogan’s office said, citing a phone conversation between presidential spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, and U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Such promises should be backed with actions so that trust between the two countries can be restored, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said when asked about McMaster’s comments.
Cavusoglu said his country wants to see “concrete” steps from the United States. These steps, he said, include severing U.S. ties with the People’s Protection Units, stopping their armament and taking back weapons it has supplied them with, as well as pressing for their withdrawal from Manbij.
Cavusoglu also criticized the U.S. for sending conflicting messages and said: “The president says something, the Pentagon says something else. There are people, U.S. soldiers, who are interweaved with [People’s Protection Units] … in the field and they say something else.”
Meanwhile, fighting raged Saturday in northwestern Syria as Turkish troops and allied militiamen tried to advance their offensive in a Kurdish-controlled enclave, Syrian opposition activists said.
The bombardment could be heard a few miles away from Afrin in the Turkish-controlled town of Azaz.
Azaz is one of the fronts from where Turkish troops and allied Syrian fighters of the so-called Free Syrian Army have started a push into Afrin to clear the area of the People’s Protection Units.
Kurdish and other activists said Saturday’s fighting concentrated around the Rajo area in Afrin, with heavy shelling and airstrikes by the Turkish forces. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syria war through a network of activists inside the country, said Turkish helicopters were attacking the town of Rajo, struggling to make progress after a week of attacks.
Turkey’s official news agency said rockets fired from the Afrin region in Syria hit a house in the border province of Kilis, injuring two people. Another rocket struck the town of Reyhanli, in Hatay province, slightly injuring one child, the Anadolu news agency reported.
The Turkish military said in a statement that two Turkish soldiers and two allied Syrian fighters were killed Saturday. It claimed that 447 People’s Protection Unit fighters have been “neutralized” since Jan. 20.
In nearby downtown Azaz, about 14 miles from Afrin, people were going about their daily lives and stores were open, but armed men were keeping a watchful eye. In the town briefly controlled by the Islamic State group at one point and a rebel bastion since 2014, children waved Turkish flags.
Syrian security forces wore recycled Turkish uniforms, some with the word POLIS written on them.
The boom of continuous shelling and People’s Protection Unit watch points in the distance were a reminder that the front line with Afrin was near.
A policeman in Azaz said that Kurds in Afrin were shelling the towns of Azaz and Marea, which have been under Turkish patronage since its 2016 cross-border operation to limit Kurdish expansion and clear the Islamic State from its border.
“We want to get rid of the terrorist [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. We don’t have a problem with the Kurdish people, only with the terrorist [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] which destroyed us and killed us, fires shells and rockets on us and on our mosques,” he said.
Separately, Syria’s main opposition negotiating body said it will boycott a peace conference in Russia this week, saying it would not lead to a genuine peace track that could end the country’s seven-year war.
The High Negotiations Committee announced the boycott of the Russia-backed conference in Sochi in a tweet Saturday night after a vote held in Vienna, where a U.N.-led conference was being held. The two-day conference ended, as in many previous rounds, with accusations hurled back and forth between the two sides in comments to the press.
“The [Syrian] regime doesn’t believe in a political solution and it will not believe in the future … it only believes in the military option,” Syrian opposition leader Naser al-Hariri said Saturday from Vienna.
Russia has been steering a separate negotiating track in Astana, and now in the Black Sea resort of Sochi where the conference is scheduled to be held Monday with the participation of some 1,600 representatives of the Syrian government and opposition.
Opposition figures have said Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces, is trying to undermine the U.N.-led talks. However the spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general on Saturday said he is confident that the conference in Sochi will be an important contribution to a “revived intra-Syrian talks under the auspices of the U.N. in Geneva,” and added that the U.N. special envoy, Staffan de Mistura, would take part in the conference.