Turkey asks U.S. to stop Kurds from shifting fighters

BEIRUT — The Turkish government took the extraordinary step Wednesday of asking the United States to stop Kurdish commanders from diverting their forces from areas of eastern Syria to the fight in Afrin in the west.

The request followed an announcement from the Kurdish forces, which are allied with the United States in the fight against the Islamic State militant group, that they intended to send 1,700 fighters from Deir elZour, a strategically important eastern province, to the fight against Turkey in Afrin, a Kurdish enclave.

Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, said his country had taken “the necessary steps” through official channels and “expected from the U.S. that it should absolutely step in” to prevent the movement of the Kurdish forces from Manbij to Afrin. “This is our most natural right,” Kalin added.

There was no immediate U.S. response to the request by the Turks, a U.S. ally and NATO member that invaded Afrin in January and threatened to drive the Kurds from the entire SyriaTurkey border. But the Turkish assault has since bogged down.

The fighting in Afrin is creating problems for the United States. The transfer of personnel from the Kurdish-led, U.S.backed militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, is a blow to Washington’s effort to stamp out the last vestiges of the Islamic State.

The SDF said in a statement Tuesday that it had made a “painful decision” to move the fighters to Afrin, citing “the failure of the international community” to pressure Turkey and “stop its madness within our Syrian borders.”