Turkish military operation imminent in Kurdish-held Afrin in Syria

ISTANBUL, July 5 (Xinhua) — Following Turkey’s deployment of troops around the Kurdish-held Afrin Canton in northwestern Syria, many feel a Turkish military operation is imminent, a sense augmented by reported withdrawal of most Russian troops from the canton.

Turkey has substantially increased the presence of its troops, tanks and artillery units around Afrin over the past two weeks, while most of the Russian troops retreated last week to areas controlled by the Syrian government, according to Turkish media reports.

The Russian withdrawal, though not officially confirmed yet, is widely seen as a tacit approval for a Turkish military move against the Kurdish militia controlling Afrin, known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

“The discourse from Ankara and the substantial military buildup at the border point to an imminent operation targeting YPG-controlled Afrin,” Faruk Logoglu, a retired diplomat who once held top posts at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, told Xinhua.

Erdogan Karakus, a former air force general in the Turkish military, takes the Russian retreat as a sign of an agreement between Ankara and Moscow.

“The Turkish military operation (against Afrin) is imminent,” he said.

The operation is aimed at cleansing the area of the YPG, said Karakus, adding that YPG elements in Manbij should be targeted as well after Afrin.

Other than Afrin Canton, Manbij in northern Syria is the only YPG-held town situated on the west bank of the Euphrates River.

The Kurdish militia have carved out three autonomous cantons along the Turkish border during the Syrian civil war, a development that Ankara fears may lead to the emergence of an autonomous or independent Kurdish entity along its border and set a precedent for its own nearly 20 million Kurds.

Speaking on state-run TRT broadcaster on Tuesday, Turkey’s Defense Minister Fikri Isik vowed not to “hesitate to stage an operation” to cope with security threats from both Afrin and Manbij.

A day earlier, government spokesman Numan Kurtulmus described the YPG in Afrin as a national security threat, implying that Ankara would not hesitate to counter any threats with a military offensive as it had done before.

Russia has understood well the threat against Turkey from Afrin as well as Ankara’s sensitivity on the issue, the spokesman said, adding that Turkey and Russia have recently had positive talks.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the end of last month and met on Sunday with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu in Istanbul, with the presence of Turkish Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar and Hakan Fidan, head of the National Intelligence Organization.

Back in March when there was talk of a possible Turkish military intervention into Afrin, Russian troops appeared in the region all of a sudden in an apparent bid to deter any Turkish military action.

Russian flags were raised near the Turkish border at that time, while photos of Russian soldiers together with the YPG fighters appeared in the press.

Karakus believes that the change in the Russian attitude is mainly linked with two recent developments.

One is the blocking by the U.S. side of Syrian troops from gaining ground around Raqqa, a stronghold of the Islamic State that Washington and its allied YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces are fighting hard to take back.

The other is the need for Russia to have Turkish support to take the city of Idlib under control under a recently-concluded cease-fire agreement aiming to end the Syrian war.

Idlib is currently under the control of radical Islamist rebels who were allowed last December to move to the city from Aleppo as part of negotiations brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Turkey is known to hold sway over the rebel groups in Idlib which had fought to topple the Syrian government, as Ankara supported the rebels in the Syrian war until it mended ties last summer with Russia, a staunch supporter of Damascus.

Based on the ongoing Syrian peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, Russian and Turkish troops are expected to jointly maintain order in Idlib, one of the four de-escalation zones created in May in efforts to end the bloody conflict.

“For Ankara, the argument for such an operation is two-fold: one is to fight the YPG as a terrorist organization and the other is to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish entity in the north of Syria,” Logoglu said of Turkey’s possible military move against Afrin.