Turkey says eight soldiers killed in its offensive
BEIRUT — Turkey’s military said eight of its soldiers were killed in its offensive on a Kurdishheld enclave in northwestern Syria.
In two separate statements late Thursday, the army announced 13 others were wounded in the operation to oust the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, from Afrin. Turkey considers them a terror group, connected to a Kurdish insurgency within its own borders.
The military death toll has now reached 41 since the launch of the Jan. 20 operation.
Private Dogan news agency reported heavy clashes in northwestern Afrin earlier Thursday, where YPG fighters attacked Turkish forces through tunnels. The agency said a Turkish evacuation helicopter could not land after coming under fire until airstrikes cleared the area. The soldiers in critical condition were then evacuated.
The five-hour daily pauses in fighting in Syria’s embattled eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus — laid out under a “unilateral” plan by Russia — are not enough to take in aid or evacuate civilians, a top U.N. aid official said Thursday.
Jan Egeland also said the U.N. Security Council resolution over the weekend calling for a 30-day cease-fire has done little to improve the situation in the rebel-held region east of Damascus.
“Since it was adopted, it did not get better — it got worse,” he said.
Eastern Ghouta was among the first areas to rise up against President Bashar Assad’s rule in 2011. The area was taken over by rebels as unrest turned into an armed insurgency, then a full-blown civil war now seven years old.
Egeland’s comments came after the Russian military accused Syria’s rebels of shelling a humanitarian corridor that Moscow set up with the Syrian government, offering residents of Damascus’ besieged eastern suburbs a way out of the embattled enclave.
Later on Thursday, Maj.Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, chief of the Russian center for reconciliation of conflicting sides in Syria, said militants in Ghouta were carrying out public executions of people who want to leave the area. He said “the hotline of the Russian reconciliation center has begun receiving calls about public executions of those who are trying to flee from the enclave.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a five-hour daily humanitarian pause to allow civilians to exit the region. The daily pauses began on Tuesday but so far, no humanitarian aid has gone in — and no civilians have left the area, except for an elderly Pakistani man and his wife who were evacuated from the town of Douma on Thursday.
The Syrian Red Crescent confirmed it managed to evacuate the family to Damascus, handing them over to the Pakistani embassy. The Kumait news agency, close to the Army of Islam rebel group headquartered in Douma, reported that the man and his wife had been living in Syria for more than 40 years and were evacuated after months of negotiations.