Turkey Says to Extend Syria Operation

Date: 24 January 2018 - 22:15

News ID: ۴۹۲۸۳

ANKARA (Dispatches) – President Tayyip Erdogan warned on Wednesday that Turkey would extend its military operation in Syria to the town of Manbij, a move that could potentially bring Turkish forces into confrontation with those of their NATO ally the United States.
Turkey’s air and ground operation, now in its fifth day, targets U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG fighters in the Afrin region and has opened a new front in Syria’s multi-sided war. A push towards Manbij some 100 km (60 miles) east of Afrin could threaten U.S. plans to stabilize a swath of northeast Syria.
Turkish forces and their allies launched Operation Olive Branch in Afrin because Ankara sees the YPG as an extension of a militant Kurdish group that has waged a three-decade insurgency in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast.
"With the Olive Branch operation, we have once again thwarted the game of those sneaky forces whose interests in the region are different,” Erdogan said in a speech to provincial leaders in Ankara.
"Starting in Manbij, we will continue to thwart their game.”
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently warned that Turkey’s operation in Afrin could expand to the nearby city of Manbij.
The Turkish military said in a statement on Tuesday that at least 260 members of the YPG and the Daesh terrorist group had been killed in the Afrin operation.
On Wednesday, the SDF accused the Turkish army of trying to mislead the world by falsely claiming that Daesh elements were active in Afrin.
"The whole world knows Daesh is not present in Afrin,” Redur Xelil, a senior SDF official, told Reuters.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has called on Turkey to exercise restraint in its military campaign against Kurdish forces in northwest Syria.
"We take very seriously Turkey's legitimate security concerns and we are committed to work with our NATO allies on those," Mattis said in Jakarta on Tuesday at the start of an Asian tour.
"We urge Turkey to exercise restraint in the military action and the rhetoric."
"The violence in Afrin disrupts what was a relatively stable area in Syria and distracts from the international effort to defeat ISIS (Daesh)," Mattis added.
Turkey launched the so-called Operation Olive Branch on Saturday in a bid to eliminate the U.S.-backed YPG, which Ankara views as a terror organization and the Syrian branch of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). The latter has been fighting for an autonomous region inside Turkey since 1984.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 22 civilians have been killed in Turkish shelling and airstrikes, and thousands have fled from the clashes.
Harsh weather conditions have disrupted air support for the operation over the past day, limiting Turkey’s advances and enabling Kurdish fighters to retake some territory.
Turkey has also been assisting the so-called Free Syrian Army militants to fight against the Kurdish fighters.

Turkish tanks stationed near the Syrian border, in Karkamis, September 3, 2016.