Kurds accuse Turkey of violations

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BEIRUT/MOSCOW, Oct 24, (RTRS): The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) accused Turkey on Thursday of launching a large land offensive targeting three villages in northeast Syria despite a truce, but Russia said a peace plan hammered out this week was going ahead smoothly.

Under the plan, agreed by presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, Syrian Kurdish forces are to withdraw more than 30 kms (19 miles) from the Turkish border, a goal Russia’s RIA news agency, quoting an SDF official, said was already achieved. Russia said it was sending more military policemen and heavy equipment to help implement the deal, which has already prompted US President Donald Trump to lift sanctions against Turkey and has drawn lavish praise for Erdogan in the Turkish media.

Ankara views the Kurdish YPG militia, the main component in the SDF, as terrorists linked to Kurdish insurgents in southeast Turkey. It launched a cross-border offensive against them on Oct 9 after Trump ordered US forces out of northeast Syria. The deal agreed with Putin, which builds on and widens a previous USbrokered ceasefire, helped end the fighting. But the SDF said in its statement on Thursday that Turkish forces had attacked three villages “outside the area of the ceasefire process, “forcing thousands of civilians to flee.

“Despite our forces’ commitment to the ceasefire decision and the withdrawal of our forces from the entire ceasefire area, the Turkish state and the terrorist factions allied to it are still violating the ceasefire process,” it said. “Our forces are still clashing,” it said, urging the United States to intervene to halt the renewed fighting. Turkey’s defence ministry did not comment directly on the SDF report but said five of its military personnel had been wounded in an attack by the YPG militia around the border town of Ras al Ain, near where the three villages are located.

Turkey has previously said it reserves the right to self-defence against any militants who remain in the area despite the truce, a pledge repeated by Erdogan on Thursday. “If these terrorists don’t pull back and continue their provocations, we will implement our plans for a (new) offensive there,” he said in a speech to local administrators.

Russia, which as a close ally of President Bashar al-Assad has emerged as the key geopolitical player in Syria, has begun deploying military policemen near the Turkish border as part of the deal agreed on Tuesday in the Russian city of Sochi. “We note with satisfaction that the agreements reached in Sochi are being implemented,” Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin as saying. “Everything is being implemented,” he said.

RIA, citing an SDF official, said the Kurdish fighters had already withdrawn to 32 km (20 miles) away from the border. It also said the Kurds were ready to discuss joining the Syrian army once the crisis in Syria has been settled politically. Russia will send a further 276 military policemen and 33 units of military hardware to Syria in a week, RIA news agency cited a defence ministry source as saying.

Next Tuesday, under the terms of the Sochi deal, Russian and Turkish forces will start to patrol a 10-km strip of land in northeast Syria where US troops had for years been deployed along with their former Kurdish allies. The arrival of the Russian police marks a shift in the regional balance of power just two weeks after Trump pulled out US forces, in a move widely criticised in Washington and elsewhere as a betrayal of the Americans’ former Kurdish allies.

The Russian deployments have also further highlighted increasingly close ties between Russia and NATO member Turkey. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper, speaking in Brussels on Thursday ahead of a NATO meeting, said Turkey – which annoyed Washington this year by buying Russian-made S400 missile defence systems – was moving in the wrong direction. “We see them spinning closer to Russia’s orbit than in the Western orbit and I think that is unfortunate,” Esper said. Despite Trump’s lifting of sanctions on Turkey, distrust persists between Ankara and Washington, and a top Erdogan aide on Thursday criticised US politicians for treating SDF commander Mazloum Kobane as a “legitimate political figure.”

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