Turkey-Syria
offensive: Kurds reach deal with Damascus to stave off assault
Agreement
to hand over border towns comes after more than 700 Isis affiliates escape camp
Bethan
McKernan in Akçakale
Mon 14 Oct
2019 08.30 BSTFirst published on Sun 13 Oct 2019 20.46 BST
Kurdish-led
forces in control of north-east Syria have reached a deal with the Assad regime
to stave off a bloody five-day-old Turkish assault, as more than 700 people
with links to Islamic State have escaped from a detention camp in the area.
Kurdish
fighters controlling the region would surrender the border towns of Manbij and
Kobane to Damascus in a deal brokered by Russia, officials said on Sunday
night.
Syrian
state media said units from President Bashar al-Assad’s army were moving north
to “confront Turkish aggression on Syrian territory”. Unconfirmed reports said
the deal between the Kurds and the regime would be extended to apply to the
whole of north-east Syria.
“After everything, it seems that the fate of
the Kurdish people [is to be abandoned]. We did everything that we could, we
called upon the international community … but it did not result in a solution.
We urged all Kurdish [groups] to show solidarity, but no one listened,” Ismat
Sheikh Hassan, the leader of the military council in Kobane, told local
television.
The deal is
likely to be a bitter end to five years of semi-autonomy for Kurdish groups in
north-east Syria, forced by Ankara’s offensive on the area. Turkey’s Operation
Peace Spring started on Wednesday after Donald Trump’s announcement that US
forces would withdraw from the region.
Trump had
not specified a timeframe for the US withdrawal from Syria, but on Sunday US
defence secretary Mark Esper said the remaining 1,000 special forces in the
country had been ordered to leave “as safely and quickly as possible” as the
fighting between Turkey and the SDF began to threaten US military positions.
The area’s
Kurdish-led fighters, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), have been funded and
trained by the US to combat Isis since 2015, finally defeating the militant
group in March after losing 11,000 troops in the battle.
Turkey,
however, says the largest unit of of the SDF, the Kurdish YPG, is a terrorist
group indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which has
fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for decades.
Trump’s
decision to abandon the SDF to an inevitable Turkish assault has been widely
criticised even by his staunchest allies as a betrayal of a US military partner
which has unleashed to a humanitarian disaster and threatens to sow the seeds
of Isis’ resurgence amid the chaos.
On Sunday,
at least 750 people with suspected links to the militant group reportedly fled
a displacement camp in north-east Syria.
France
voiced its concern at the report. Government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye told
France 3 television: “I do not know, today, who exactly the people are who fled
from the camp; it has been a worry for France since the beginning of this armed
intervention.”
France has
been hit by a wave of jihadist attacks since 2015, many claimed or inspired by
Isis, and has expressed concerns that a Turkish assault would bolster the
group.
On Monday,
the French presidency said in a statement it was taking measures to protect its
personnel inside Syria. “Measures will be taken in the coming hours to ensure
the safety of French military and civilian personnel present in the zone as
part of the international coalition fighting Islamic State and humanitarian
action,” the statement said.
The women
and children formerly part of the “caliphate” had been held in a secure annexe
at the Ain Issa camp. They began to riot and scared away the guards after
Turkish shelling struck close to the area on Sunday, said Abdulkader Mwahed,
the joint president for humanitarian affairs in the Kurdish-held part of Syria.
The
UK-based monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number to have
escaped at 100, publishing pictures of men, women in black niqabs and small
children running through yellow scrubland.
The camp
was home to a total of about 13,000 people, including three suspected British
orphans and a British recruiter for Isis, Tooba Gondal.
Turkish
president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s stated goal is to create a 20-mile-deep “safe
zone” on its border with the SDF, enough to keep Turkish border towns out of
the range of shelling and rocket fire.
However,
Ain Issa and other Kurdish-held roads and towns south of the proposed safe zone
have been hit by airstrikes and shelling. Syrian rebel proxies fighting on
behalf of Turkey were pushing south and refused to allow the town of Manbij to
fall into regime hands, a fighter with the Syrian National Army (SNA) rebel
umbrella group said, reporting that Turkey had begun shelling the SDF-held town
west of the Euphrates.
A convoy of
40 armoured Turkish trucks travelled into Syria from the Jarablus border
crossing to reinforce the Turkish offensive, another military source said.
Speaking on
Sunday, Erdoğan rejected offers for mediation with the SDF and criticised his
western Nato allies for standing by what Turkey considers to be a terrorist
organisation.
He also
dismissed the reports of escaped Isis prisoners as “disinformation” aimed at
provoking the US and other western countries.
About
130,000 people have been displaced in Syria in the five-day-old operation so
far, with at least 60 civilian casualties in Syria and 18 dead in Turkey after
counterattack SDF shelling of Turkish border towns.
The SNA
summarily executed nine civilians including a female politician, a human rights
monitor has claimed. The umbrella group said it had ordered an investigation
and commanders were to “continuously supervise combatants on the frontlines to
prevent any abuse”.
Additional reporting by Hussein Akkosh
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