US halts IS attacks over Kurd allegiances
WASHINGTON — U.S.backed ground operations against Islamic State remnants in eastern Syria have been put on hold because Kurds who had spearheaded combat against the extremists have shifted to a separate fight with Turkish forces, U.S. officials said Monday.
The acknowledgement of what Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, called an "operational pause" is the most-explicit sign yet that Turkey's intervention in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin is hindering the U.S. effort to finish off IS in Syria.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other U.S. officials have called Turkey's operation a "distraction" from the antiIS campaign. Mattis also has said the U.S. understands that Turkey has an active Kurdish insurgency inside its own borders and that it views Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG, to be a terrorist organization. The U.S. says the YPG is separate from the Kurdish fighters inside the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, but Turkey disagrees.
Turkey launched its offensive in the Afrin enclave on Jan. 20. It is just one dimension of a complex war in Syria that includes local opposition fighters, extremist elements, Syrian government troops, proxy forces and units from Russia and the U.S.
Manning said U.S. airstrikes against IS holdouts in the Euphrates River Valley are continuing.
Meanwhile, trucks laden with international aid edged into the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta on Monday, delivering the first relief to its shellshocked residents in more than three months — but only after government officials had removed many of the medical supplies.
Shortly before, the assault and the bloodshed continued in a pocket that still holds an estimated 393,000 people. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll in the offensive that began Feb. 18 now stands at 710.
The U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva passed a resolution condemning the government’s 2-week-old bombardment of the rebelheld enclave and calling for an immediate end to hostilities.