The Syrian regime yesterday sent troops towards the Turkish border to contain Ankara’s deadly offensive against the Kurds, stepping in for US forces due to begin a controversial withdrawal.
Outgunned and without US protection, the autonomous Kurds in northeastern Syria had few other options to stop the rapid advance of Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies.
Turkey wants to create a roughly 30km buffer zone along its border to keep Kurdish forces at bay and also to send back some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts.
Photo: AFP
The US and its partners, who spent years fighting alongside the Kurds against the Islamic State group in Syria before deserting them, have condemned the Turkish invasion, but their threats of sanctions have failed to stop it.
Washington said it is planning to pull out 1,000 troops — almost the entire ground force — from Syria’s north, in a move Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday welcomed as “a positive approach.”
The chaos in the areas targeted in the six-day-old Turkish assault has already led to the escape of about 800 foreign women and children linked to Islamic State group from a Kurdish-run camp, Kurdish authorities said.
The Kurds had repeatedly warned of that scenario when Western countries refused to repatriate their Islamic State-linked nationals and when US President Donald Trump made it clear he wanted to end the US military presence.
However, Trump said the Kurds “may be releasing” IS prisoners to keep the US involved in Syria.
Wasting no time to fill the void, Moscow — already the top broker in Syria — clinched a deal between the Kurds and Damascus, whose ties had been icy since the minority threw its lot with Washington and unilaterally declared self-rule.
“In order to prevent and confront this aggression, an agreement has been reached with the Syrian government,” the Kurdish administration said in a statement late on Sunday.
In an editorial published in Foreign Policy magazine, the head of the main Kurdish force wrote: “If we have to choose between compromises and the genocide of our people, we will surely choose life for our people.”
By yesterday morning, Syrian government forces were already moving to within several kilometers of the border, Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents on the ground said.
Residents around the town of Tall Tamr welcomed regime forces with cheers and Syrian state television showed some of them waving national flags and portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Syrian troops also deployed in the areas of Tabqa and Ain Issa in the northern province of Raqa, Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
According to a newspaper close to the Damascus regime, Syrian forces were also expected to deploy in the areas of Manbij and the border town of Kobane.
An internal document circulated by the Kurdish administration yesterday, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, said the deal with Damascus was purely of a military nature and did not affect the work of the semi-autonomous institutions.
However, the de facto statelet the Kurdish administration had set up in northeastern Syria has fast unraveled in recent days, with its forces losing control of a 120km-long segment of the border.
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