Turkey defiant to truce
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has dispatched his deputy Mike Pence to Turkey to demand a ceasefire in Syria, as Ankara rebuffed international pressure to curb its deadly offensive against Kurdish forces.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Wednesday that Turkey's operation -- which has been facilitated by the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria -- would continue.
That came as an extraordinary letter emerged in which Trump warned Erdogan: "Don't be a fool".
Sent the day Turkey launched its incursion into northeastern Syria, Trump said history risked branding him a "devil".
On Wednesday, Kurdish forces struck a desperate deal with Damascus and stepped aside to allow Syrian regime troops and allied Russian soldiers enter the border town of Kobane, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Kobane is a highly symbolic town for Syria's Kurds, whose forces had in 2015 wrested it from the Islamic State (IS) group in an epic battle backed by the US-led coalition.
Days after American troops abruptly began withdrawing, clashes continued across the region, with Kurdish fighters in the border town of Ras al-Ain burning tyres in a bid to blind Ankara's warplanes and digging in against a ground offensive by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.
The Turkish operation, now in its second week, has triggered a flurry of diplomacy among major powers.
Trump sent Pence along with his top diplomat Mike Pompeo to Turkey amid the greatest crisis in relations for decades between the NATO allies, with talks due in Ankara early Thursday.
Facing a barrage of criticism in Washington for abandoning the Kurds, Trump has imposed sanctions on three Turkish ministers and raised tariffs on its steel industry.
Pence's office said the US would pursue "punishing economic sanctions" unless there was "an immediate ceasefire".
In the missive to Erdogan dated October 9 -- whose authenticity was confirmed to AFP by the White House -- Trump wrote: "You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy -- and I will."
But Erdogan told the Turkish parliament that the only way to solve Syria's problems was for the Kurdish forces to "lay down their arms... destroy all their traps and get out of the safe zone that we have designated".
- Trump says Kurds 'protected' -Trump again dismissed the idea that pulling out 1,000 troops -- practically the entire US contingent in the region -- had been a betrayal of Kurdish militants who bore the brunt of the fight against IS in recent years.