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Turkey Launches New Attack Against ISIS, Kurds In Syria
[NEWSWEEK] ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria on Saturday, as Turkish tanks rolled across the border and Syrian fighters swept in from the west to take villages held by the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... myrmidon group (ISIS). The incursion was launched by Turkey from Kilis province--an area frequently targeted by ISIS rockets--and coincided with a separate push by the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, who seized several villages further to the east. By supporting the rebels, mainly Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army ... the more palatable version of the Syrian insurgency, heavily influenced by the Moslem Brüderbund... , Turkey is hoping to drive out ISIS The rebels last week took the frontier town of Jarablus with Turkish support. The operation, called Euphrates Shield, is Ankara's first full-scale Syrian incursion since the start of the five-year-old war. On Saturday the tanks crossed the frontier and entered the Syrian rebel-controlled town of al-Rai to support the new offensive, a rebel front man and monitors said. al-Rai is about 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus, and part of a 90-km corridor near the Turkish border that Ankara says it is clearing of jihadists and protecting from Kurdish militia expansion. The rebels then seized villages to the east and the south of al-Rai, according to one rebel official. "They took several villages, about eight villages. At first they took two and withdrew from them, but then reinforcements came and there was an advance," Zakaria Malahifji of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim group told Rooters. The Turkish-backed operation was putting pressure on ISIS from both east and west of a stretch of territory it controls along the border between the towns.
Turkish Firtina howitzers fired on ISIS targets as the fresh armored contingent advanced, Dogan said. In the last few months, al-Rai has repeatedly changed hands between pro-Ankara faceless myrmidons and ISIS. Ahmed Othman, a commander in pro-Turkey Lion of Islam group Sultan Murad, told AFP in Beirut that his group was now "working on two fronts in al-Rai, south and east, in order to advance towards the villages recently liberated from IS west of Jarablus". Othman said it was the first phase of their plans. "We want to clear the border area between al-Rai and Jarablus from ISIS, before advancing south towards al-Bab (the last IS bastion in Aleppo) and Manbij (controlled by pro Kurdish forces)." After the Kurds’ success in Manbij, they said they wanted to advance and link their other two ’cantons’ in northern Syria, Kobane and Afrin. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him... said on Friday that Turkey would not allow the group to create a "terror corridor". Ankara sees the YPG as a terror organization linked to Kurdish separatist rebels in southeast Turkey but the United States has provided training and equipment to the group. The intervention last month caused another complication in what was already a tangled five-year civil war, with Ankara and Washington supporting different proxy groups seeking to retake territory from ISIS.
“Turkey-backed rebels and the Turkish army captured the city of Jarablus from ISIS without a fight, which confirms that there are undeclared agreements between Turkey and ISIS,” Ali Battal, member of the Syrian National Democratic Union, told ARA News. Subsequent to the Turkish advance in Jarablus, clashes erupted between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the pro-Turkey factions. “After invading Jarablus city, Turkey tries to cut off the YPG-SDF supply routes in northern Syria and prevent those forces from eliminating ISIS terrorists,” Battal said. Posted by: Fred 2016-09-04 |
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