Syria enters strategic city
Syrian army moves into Manbij in new alliance with Kurds after US announces withdrawal of troops
BEIRUT: Syrian troops deployed in support of Kurdish forces in a strategic northern city, in a shift of alliances hastened by last week’s announcement of a US military withdrawal.
Nearly eight years into Syria’s deadly conflict, the move marked another key step in President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed drive to reassert control over the country.
Buoyed by its military victories, the regime is also making progress in efforts to break its diplomatic isolation, with Thursday’s reopening of the Emirati embassy in Damascus.
The Syrian army announced that it had raised the flag in Manbij, a strategic city close to the Turkish border where US-led coalition forces are stationed.
A military spokesman said in a televised announcement that the army would be bent on “crushing terrorism and defeating all invaders and occupiers”.
More than 300 government forces deployed in the Manbij area, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Britain-based war monitor stressed however that regime troops had mostly moved into areas around the city, inside which US and French forces are still believed to be stationed.
Their deployment creates a regime buffer arching across northern Syria that fully separates the Turkish army and its proxies from the Kurds.
US President Donald Trump’s shock announcement last week that he was ordering all US forces back home left the Kurds in the cold.
The People’s Protection Units (YPG) have been the backbone of an alliance that has spearheaded the US-backed fight against the Islamic State group in Syria.
They are currently battling the last remnants of the militants’ once sprawling “caliphate” in the country’s far east, near the border with Iraq.
A US withdrawal will leave them exposed to an assault by Turkey, which has thousands of proxy fighters in northern Syria and wants to crush Kurdish forces it considers terrorists.
The Kurds issued a statement welcoming the regime advance, a pragmatic shift in alliances that will dash their aspirations for autonomy but could help cut their losses after a US pullout they resent as a betrayal.
“We invite the Syrian govern- ment forces... to assert control over the areas our forces have withdrawn from, particularly in Manbij, and to protect these areas against a Turkish invasion,” the YPG said in a statement.
After Manbij, the focus is likely to move to Raqa, a mostly Arab city that the Kurds liberated from IS last year and that the regime has vowed to retake. — AFP