US berets in Kobane … Russia bombs rebels

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BEIRUT, Nov 26, (Agencies): US soldiers are in Kobane, the town in northern Syria nearly destroyed in fierce fighting with the Islamic State group, to train Kurdish forces to battle the jihadists, Kurdish sources said Thursday.

Mustapha Abdi, an activist in the town on the Turkish border, told AFP the American instructors had arrived “in recent hours” in what is the first official deployment of US ground troops in Syria. A source with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) said the Americans would help plan offensives against two Syrian cities held by IS — Jarablus and the jihadists’ Syrian “capital”, Raqa.

At the same time, they would have a role in coordinating with the Kurds and their Arab and Syriac Christian allies on the ground air strikes on IS by the US-lead coalition, the YPG source said. Abdi said that the troops who had arrived were a “first group of instructors” who would train the Kurds. He did not say how many of them had arrived or to what branch, or branches, of the military they belong.

However, Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitor, said “more than 50 American instructors have arrived in northern and northeastern Syria”. He said they had arrived in two groups over the past two days, coming from Turkey and from the autonomous Kurdish region of neighbouring Iraq. He said about 30 of them were in Kobane itself, with the rest in Hasakeh province in eastern Syria.

Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a local network of sources, said the US troops are expected to regroup in Kobane to train fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of factions backed by the United States.

The news comes after Brett McGurk, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the coalition, said Sunday that US forces would be arriving on the ground “very soon”. At the end of October, Obama authorised the deployment of 50 special operations troops to Syria, and McGurk said their job would be to “organise” local forces.

A key objective will be to “isolate” Raqa, he said. The alliance of local fighters has already retaken more than 1,000 square kms (386 square miles) from IS and killed around 300 IS fighters, McGurk said. IS began an offensive on the Kobane area, which lies right on the Turkish border, in September of last year. Within just a couple of weeks it had captured scores of villages and towns around Kobane city and attacked it, prompting thousands of Kurds to flee their homes. After a desperate resistance that drew worldwide attention, the Kurds managed to regain full control of the city in January and eventually retake most of the lost territory. Elsewhere, residents said on Thursday that Russian warplanes bombed a rebelheld Syrian town along the Turkish border a day after hitting a truck depot near a crossing between the two countries. One resident said the air strikes hit a busy main square in the town of Saraqeb in Idlib province, where hundreds of vehicles brought in through the nearby Bab al Hawa border crossing were being sold.

A second resident who was nearby and witnessed the bombing said several wounded people had been taken to hospital. Hundreds of drivers had raced away from the scene immediately afterwards in the vehicles they had hoped to sell, he said. Residents and rebels in the area say it is easy to identify planes from factors including the altitude at which they fly and the number of planes in the sorties. The car market in Saraqeb is the biggest in the province and the town is also Idlib’s main commercial hub. Jets, believed to be Russian, hit a depot for trucks waiting to go through a major rebel-controlled border crossing, Bab al- Salam, on Wednesday, the head of the crossing said. Syrian jets have struck that area before but, if confirmed to have been carried out by Russia, it would be one of Moscow’s closest air strikes to Turkish territory, targeting a humanitarian corridor into rebelheld Syria and an important transit point for Syrian civilians crossing to Turkey. Turkey shot down a Russian jet, which it said entered its air space, on Tuesday.

Russia said the plane had not left Syrian air space. Russia on Thursday pledged broad retaliatory measures against Turkey’s economy in revenge for the downing of one of its warplane, as recriminations between Moscow and Ankara reached fever pitch. President Vladimir Putin demanded an apology but his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan bluntly refused, accusing Moscow of slander over claims his country was supporting the brutal Islamic State group. The downing of the plane raised fears it could fuel a wider geopolitical conflict and highlighted the difficulty of forging consensus on the fate of Syria as French President Francois Hollande arrived in Moscow for talks with Putin.

While Russia ruled out any military retaliation against NATO member Turkey over Tuesday’s incident, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave his ministers two days to work out “a system of response measures” in the economic and humanitarian spheres. He said the broad punitive steps for what he termed “this act of aggression” could include halting joint economic projects, restricting financial and trade transactions and changing customs duties. Measures could also target transport and tourism after Putin told citizens not to travel to Turkey, a hugely popular tourist destination.

The foreign ministry also urged those already in the country Turkey to return home due to “existing terrorist threats”. Russia also tightened control over Turkish food imports over alleged safety standard violations, saying it would organise additional checks at the border and production sites in Turkey. Economy minister Alexei Ulyukayev for his part did not rule out that the measures could hit two major projects with Turkey — the planned Turk Stream gas pipeline and the Akkuyu nuclear power plant — in a move that looked set to rattle cages in energy-poor Turkey. In another move likely to infuriate Ankara, lawmakers from the Kremlinfriendly A Just Russia party introduced a bill calling for a maximum punishment of five years in jail for those who deny the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 was a genocide.

Turkey has always denied the killings were a premeditated attempt by the Ottoman Empire to wipe out the Armenians. Ahead of the Hollande talks on the Syrian crisis, Putin and Erdogan traded barbs, with the Kremlin chief saying he was waiting for an apology and Erdogan ruling out any such move. “We are under the impression that the Turkish leadership is deliberately pushing Russian-Turkish relations into deadlock. We regret that,” said Putin. He flayed Turkey for “treacherous stabs in the back” and accused its leadership of buttressing the IS jihadists financially and militarily. Erdogan insisted his country did not buy any oil from the Islamic State group. “Shame on you. Those who claim we buy oil from DAESH are obliged to prove it. If not, you are a slanderer,” he said in a speech. He also refused to make amends, saying it was Russia that needed to apologise.

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