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Turkey plans assault on Kurdish enclave in Syria
 [Guardian] Turkey’s president has said the country will launch a military assault on a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria "in the coming days" and urged the US to support its efforts.Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the operation against the Afrin enclave aimed to "purge terror" from his country’s southern border. Afrin is controlled by a Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. Turkey considers the YPG to be a terrorist group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) that has waged a bloody insurgency within its borders. A YPG spokesman in Afrin said there had been clashes on Sunday between his unit and Turkish troops near the border. Rojhat Roj said shelling of areas in Afrin district, in Aleppo province, had killed one YPG fighter and injured two civilians. Turkey and its western allies, including the US, consider the PKK a terrorist organisation. But the US has been arming some of Syria’s Kurds to help defeat Islamic State in Syria ‐ a sore point in already tense US-Turkish relations. The Turkish president said that "despite it all" he wanted to work with the US in the region and hoped it would not side with the YPG during the Afrin operation. "We expect [the US] to support Turkey in its legitimate efforts" to combat terror, Erdogan said. Separately, Erdogan’s spokesman described as "worrying" reports that the US-led coalition fighting Isis would establish a 30,000-strong border security force in Syria involving the Kurdish militia. Posted by: Besoeker 2018-01-15 |
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