EAST OF EUPHRATES PEACE MUST: TURKEY
Erdogan says he will use force to ensure harmony in the area
ISTANBUL: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said Turkey was determined to bring peace to areas east of the Euphrates controlled by a Kurdish militia after he warned this week of a new operation in Syria.
“We are determined to bring peace and security to areas east of the Euphrates” River in northern Syria, Erdogan said during a speech in Istanbul.
“Turkey has lost enough time in terms of intervening to clean the terror swamp east of the Euphrates. We don’t have the patience to wait one more day,” he added.
The head of state on Wednesday said Turkey would launch an offensive against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia within the “next few days” east of the river.
Ankara views the Us-backed YPG as a “terrorist offshoot” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is blacklisted as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies.
But the YPG has spearheaded the United States’ ight against the Daesh extremist group under the banner of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.
The latest threats by Turkey are likely to cause tension with Washington after relations suffered in the past couple of years due to US support to the YPG.
Following Erdogan’s operation warning, the Pentagon on Wednesday said any unilateral military action in northern Syria would be of “grave concern” and “unacceptable”.
One of the main issues recently has been the setting up of US observation posts on the northeast Syrian border to prevent altercations between Turkish forces and the YPG.
Turkey had called on the US not BEIRUT: Syrian Kurdish parties said on Friday that Turkish threats to attack northern Syria amounted to a “declaration of war” and urged world powers to prevent an assault on the region.
“All the forces in north and east Syria...are asked to agree on strategies to confront this aggression,” read a statement signed by Syria’s main Kurdish parties and other allied groups. to go ahead with the move last week.
American forces are with the SDF east of the Euphrates as well as in the lashpoint city of Manbij, which is west of the river.
Following threats by Erdogan this year to attack Ypg-held Manbij, the US and Turkey agreed a “roadmap” which would mean the YPG would leave Manbij and that Nato allies would work together to establish a local security structure and decide who will govern.
“Here is what we say: either you clean the city and (the YPG) leave, or we’re going into Manbij as well,” Erdogan said on Friday.
Separately, Kurdish-led forces seized the Daesh’s main hub of Hajin on Friday, a milestone in a massive and costly Us-backed operation to eradicate the militants from eastern Syria.
The Syrian Democratic Forces secured Hajin, the largest settlement in what is the last pocket of territory controlled by Daesh, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“After a week of heavy ighting and air strikes, the SDF were able to kick Daesh out of Hajin,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, said.
The operation was completed at dawn, he said, a day after SDF forces fanned out across the large village in the Euphrates valley.
On Thursday, the last Daesh ighters were conined to a network of tunnels and the edges of Hajin, which lies in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the border with Iraq.
The area held by Daesh is sometimes referred to as the “Hajin pocket”. Daesh ighters pulled back to positions east of Hajin Friday and to Sousa and Al-shaafa, the other two main villages in their shrinking Euphrates valley enclave.
As recently as Thursday, the group posted pictures of ighting in Hajin on its social media accounts.
According to Abdel Rahman, a total of 17,000 ighters from the Kurdisharab SDF alliance are involved in the operation to lush Daesh out of its last bastion.
The operation was launched on Sept.10 and has taken a heavy toll, according to igures collected by the Observatory, which has a vast network of sources on the ground.
At least 900 militants and 500 SDF ighters were killed in the ighting, the monitoring group said.
According to Abdel Rahman, more than 320 civilians were also killed, many of them in air strikes by the Us-led coalition.
Thousands more civilians who had remained, voluntarily or not, in the Hajin area have led their homes since the start of the offensive three months ago.
US President Donald Trump this week predicted the extremist group would be fully defeated within a month.
“We’ve done a very, very major job on Daesh,” he said on Tuesday.
“There are very few of them left in that area of the world. And within another 30 days, there won’t be any of them left,” he vowed.
Western and other oficials have repeatedly announced deadlines for a inal victory over Daesh but the group is proving resilient.
The push to retake Hajin was delayed by Turkish threats on the Kurdish heartland further north and deadly counter-attacks by die-hard militants making a bloody last stand.
Turkish threats are ‘declaration of war’, say Syrian Kurdish parties