Street fight looms as Turkey moves to storm Kurds

ANKARA: Turkey is preparing for a street-by-street fight to capture the most important Kurdish-held town in northern Syria, and if victorious, won’t transfer control to the Syrian government, according to a senior official.

“We have no intention to hand Afrin over to the regime,” Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told state-run TRT television on Thursday. The entire Afrin enclave, now largely under Turkish forces, should be run by its local population, he said.

The Turkish campaign to expel USbacked Kurdish fighters from the border area is reaching a crucial juncture almost two months after it began, with the likelihood of greater Turkish casualties as fighting enters urban areas.

It also slows down the fight against Islamic State as some senior leaders of Kurdish forces have moved from the battle in the south to Afrin, Marine Corps Lt Gen Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Staff, said on Thursday. “That has had an effect on our ability to finish off Isis in the lower Euphrates River Valley,” the general said.

Turkish authorities view the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia as an extension of the PKK separatists they have fought in eastern Turkey for decades. Mr Erdogan vowed on Thursday that the army won’t leave Afrin “before the job is done”, and has signalled he wants to broaden the offensive into northeastern Syria, and then target PKK bases in Iraq.

Afrin is thought to have been heavily fortified with concrete tunnels and explosives, and while many civilians have fled, tens of thousands could be caught in a prolonged battle. The YPG will defend the town with all it has, said Elizabeth Teoman, who specialises in Syria and Turkey at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

“The loss of Afrin city would hurt the YPG’s legitimacy in defending ethnically Kurdish areas in northern Syria and ultimately undermine” its statehood ambitions, she said by email. “Erdogan will exploit operational success against the YPG in Syria to conduct follow-on operations against the PKK in Iraq.”

The YPG on Wednesday pledged to fight Turkish soldiers and their Syrian Arab and Turkmen allies, accusing the Turkish government of sending refugees from Turkish camps into Afrin in order to change the region’s demographic, the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency reported.