ONCUPINAR (Reuters/MEMO) – Turkey’s army needs just a few days to be ready for a ground incursion into northern Syria and such a decision may come at a cabinet meeting, Turkish officials said, as Turkish forces bombarded a Kurdish militia across the border.
Howitzers fired daily from Turkey have struck Kurdish YPG targets for a week, while warplanes have carried out airstrikes.
The escalation comes after a deadly bomb attack in Istanbul two weeks ago that Ankara blamed on the YPG militia. The YPG has denied involvement in the bombing and has responded at times to the cross-border attacks with mortar shelling.
“The Turkish Armed Forces needs just a few days to become almost fully ready,” one senior official said, adding that Turkey-allied militants in Syria were ready for such an operation just a few days after the Nov. 13 Istanbul bomb.
“It won’t take long for the operation to begin,” he said. “It depends only on the president giving the word.”
Turkey has previously launched military incursions in Syria against the YPG, regarding it as a wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey has designated a terrorist group.
The PKK has also denied carrying out the Istanbul attack, in which six people were killed on a busy pedestrian avenue.
President Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey would launch a land operation when convenient to secure its southern border.
“All the preparations are complete. It’s now a political decision,” another Turkish official told Reuters, also requesting anonymity ahead of the meeting.
Meanwhile, Erdogan says normalization of relations with the Arab country is possible.
“Just as relations between [Turkey] and Egypt take shape, ties with Syria can follow the same path in the next period,” Erdogan said on Sunday.
He was referring to an ongoing normalization process between Turkey and Egypt, which saw Erdogan meet with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the World Cup in Doha last Sunday. Ankara severed its ties with Cairo in 2013 in protest at the latter’s bloody crackdown on the followers of late Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.
“There is no room for hard feelings in politics,” Erdogan also said.
The Turkish presidency’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said last month that Russia had offered to mediate a meeting between Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar Assad.