Russian military forces crossed the Euphrates River in Syria and moved into positions near the border with Turkey to ensure Kurdish fighters pull back, the Russian Ministry of Defense said yesterday, after a deal between Moscow and Ankara wrested control of the Kurds’ entire heartland.
The ministry said in a statement that a convoy of Russian military police had crossed the river at noon and “advanced toward the Syrian-Turkish border.”
Kurdish forces, who previously controlled nearly a third of Syria, have lost almost everything after Turkey secured the right to remain fully deployed in an Arab-majority area that was the main target of a two-week-old offensive.
The agreement made on Tuesday in Sochi also requires Kurdish militia to pull back to a line 30km from the border along its entire length of 440km, forcing them to relinquish control of some of their main towns.
The deal — hailed as “historic” by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — quashes the Kurdish minority’s dreams of a semi-autonomous region and makes way for the absorption of their de facto army into the regime’s military.
Yesterday, Russia’s state Rossiya 24 television channel and TASS news agency quoted the defense ministry as saying Russian military police and Syrian border guards are to “facilitate the removal” of Kurdish People’s Protection Units fighters and their weapons, as according to the Sochi deal.
This withdrawal must be finalised within 150 hours.
Russian and Turkish patrols would then start in two zones stretching 10km to the east and west of Turkey’s safe zone, which is about 120km long and 32km deep.
This would allow Turkey to patrol with Russia in areas inside Syria that were not part of its offensive.
Russian military police patroled the key city of Kobani yesterday, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the area of the “safe zone” was calm yesterday.
In the Kurdish-controlled city of Qamishli — excluded from the Sochi agreement — hundreds demonstrated against the deal, saying it amounted to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
“This deal serves the interests of foreign powers and not the interests of the people,” said Talaat Youndes, an official with the Kurdish administration.
“Turkey’s objective is to kill, displace and occupy the Kurds,” he said, as protesters waved flags and chanted slogans against Ankara’s invading force.
Turkey’s Oct. 9 assault was made possible by a pullback of US troops deployed along the border as a buffer force between their NATO ally Turkey and the Kurdish fighters of the SDF.
The withdrawal by their erstwhile ally left the Kurds completely in the lurch, forcing them to turn to the Damascus regime for protection from an expanded Turkish offensive.
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