Regime steps in to halt Turkish assault

0

Locals welcome Syrian regime forces as they arrive at the western entrance of the town of Tal Tamr in the countryside of Syria’s northeastern Hasakeh province. — AFP photo

TALL TAMR, Syria: The Syrian regime sent troops towards the Turkish border on Monday 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 30-km 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.

The United States and its partners – who spent years fighting the Islamic State group in Syria before deserting them – have condemned the Turkish invasion but their threats of sanctions have failed to stop it.

The chaos in the areas targeted in the six-day-old Turkish assault has already led to the escape of around 800 foreign women and children linked to IS from a Kurdish-run camp, Kurdish authorities said.

The Kurds had repeatedly warned of that scenario when Western countries refused to repatriate their IS-linked nationals and when US President Donald Trump made it clear he wanted to end US military presence.

Wasting no time to fill the void, Moscow clinched a deal between the Kurds and Damascus.

“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 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 Monday morning, Syrian government forces were already moving to within several kilometres (miles) of the border, 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 President Bashar al-Assad.

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.

The main remaining flashpoint along the border was the town of Ras al-Ain, where Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been putting up stiff resistance against Turkish air strikes and shelling for almost a week.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Turkish attack — which uses Syrian proxies on the ground –has already left 121 SDF fighters and 60 civilians dead.

An air strike on a convoy that included SDF fighters, civilians and journalists Sunday killed at least 10 people in the Ras al-Ain area. Footage circulated by local media showed gruesome scenes taken moments after the hit, with bodies strewn amidst the convoy’s vehicles.

Overwhelmed medics in a hospital in Qamishli struggled to treat the wounded.

On the Turkish side, four soldiers and 18 civilians have been confirmed killed in six days, either in fighting or from Kurdish cross-boder fire, according to Turkish sources. The Observatory put the number of pro-Turkish Syrian forces killed in the offensive at 86.

An internal document circulated by the Kurdish administration on Monday, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, stressed the deal with Damascus was purely of a military nature and did not affect the work of the semi-autonomous institutions.

But the de-facto statelet the Kurdish administration had set up in northeastern has fast unravelled in recent days, with its forces losing control of a 120 km-long segment of the border.

The area that is now under the control of Turkey and its proxies is ethnically Arab-dominated and some residents welcomed Turkish-backed forces. – AFP