BEIRUT, Dec 23, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Turkey on Saturday sent military
reinforcements to northern Syria near an area controlled by Kurdish forces as
Ankara threatens to carry out a fresh offensive to wipe them out, a war
monitor said.
The move comes after US President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement on
Wednesday of the withdrawal of American troops stationed in northeastern
Syria alongside Kurdish fighters, a long-time enemy of Turkey.
Washington has for years supported the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF) in the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria, as part
of an international anti-jihadist coalition dominated by the People’s
Protection Units (YPG).
But on Wednesday Trump said he was ordering a withdrawal of the estimated
2,000 US troops in Syria because IS had been defeated, an assessment
rubbished by many.
“Around 35 tanks and other heavy weapons, carried aboard tank carriers,
crossed the Jarablos border crossing in the early evening,” Rami Abdel
Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
told AFP.
“They headed for an area near the Sajour River, between Jarablos and
Minbej, not far from the front lines where Kurdish fighters of the Minbej
Military Council are stationed,” he added.
Turkey accuses the YPG of being a “terrorist offshoot” of the outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has been waging an insurgency against
the Turkish state since 1984.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday vowed to drive both the
YPG and IS from Syria.
Ankara fears a Kurdish state could be established on its borders, which it
believes could reinforce separatist ambitions of the Kurdish minority in
Turkey.
The Kurdish community accounts for 15 percent of Syria’s population and
controls around 30 percent of the country, as a federal region declared in
2016.
In the past two years Turkey has conducted two offensives into northern
Syria. In 2016 it launched an operation against IS, which also aimed to block
the YPG from joining up the territory it held in northern Syria.
And in January 2018 Turkey staged an offensive against the militia in its
northwestern enclave of Afrin.