Cease-fire denied
Turkey rejects U.S. calls for truce, tells Kurds to disarm.
ISTANBUL — Turkey rebuffed U.S. calls for a ceasefire in northeastern Syria as it pressed ahead Wednesday with an offensive targeting Syrian Kurdish forces and demanded that the fighters lay down their arms.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Kurdish fighters should “drop their weapons” and withdraw from designated border areas. Turkey launched the offensive last week to rout Kurdish-led forces it says pose a threat to national security along the Turkish frontier, where it hopes to establish a buffer zone.
Erdogan’s apparent rejection of U.S. mediation came as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepared to fly to Turkey to persuade Ankara to end a campaign that has become a political liability for the Trump administration and a potential threat to U.S. troops.
Erdogan “needs to stop the incursion into Syria,” Pompeo said in an interview Wednesday on Fox Business Network.
“We need a cease-fire,” he said. “At which point we can begin to put this all back together again.”
The Turkish operation, which includes Syrian rebels, has upended alliances and reignited tensions in a particularly volatile corner of Syria, where U.S. troops for years partnered with Kurdish-led fighters to battle the Islamic State.
As the U.S. military continued its withdrawal Wednesday, it vacated Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the Islamic State, as well as Tabqa and a major headquarters at the Lafarge Cement Factory in Jalabiya, Army Col. Myles Caggins, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a tweet.
At the cement factory, after American troops had left, U.S. forces used F-15 jets to carry out airstrikes on parts of the headquarters to “destroy an ammunition cache and reduce the facility’s military usefulness,” Caggins wrote.
In addition to the ammunition, the strikes targeted a small compound that was ringed with blast walls and included living quarters and diesel power generators, said a U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation.
The strikes came one day after Russian forces took over a different outpost near Manbij after U.S. forces vacated it. A journalist embedded with the Russians posted photos and videos of the base, showing that while the Americans appeared to have taken their weapons and armored vehicles with them, they had left behind construction equipment, electronics, tents and food.
The fighting has undermined security around camps and detention centers holding Islamic State prisoners and their families, allowing some to escape amid the chaos, aid workers and diplomats said.
Erdogan vowed to forge ahead with plans to enforce a buffer zone as deep as 20 miles into Syrian territory.
“Nobody can stop us,” Erdogan said in a speech to parliament Wednesday.