Turkey rebuffed international pressure to curb its deadly offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria on Wednesday as US President Donald Trump dispatched his deputy Mike Pence to Ankara to demand a ceasefire.
But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Turkey's operation - which has been facilitated by the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria - would continue.
An another front, Kurdish forces struck a desperate deal with Damascus and stepped aside to allow Syrian regime troops and allied Russian soldiers enter the border town of Kobane on Wednesday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Kobane is a highly symbolic town for Syria's Kurds, whose forces had in 2015 wrested the town from Islamic State (IS) group control in an epic battle backed by the US-led coalition.
Days after US troops abruptly began withdrawing, clashes continued across the region on Thursday, with Kurdish fighters in the border town of Ras al-Ain burning tyres in a bid to blind Ankara's warplanes and digging in against a ground offensive by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.
The Turkish operation, now in its second week, has triggered a flurry
The UN Security Council warned in a unanimously adopted statement of a risk of "dispersion" of jihadist prisoners, but stopped short of calling for an end to Turkey's offensive. The head of Belgium's national anti-terrorist agency on Wednesday said two Belgian jihadists have escaped from detention in recent days.
Since launching their assault on October 9, Turkey and its Syrian rebel proxies have secured more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) of border, but Ras al-Ain has held out.
Erdogan wants to create a buffer zone stretching 30 kilometres from the border into Syrian territory.
The offensive has left dozens of civilians dead, mostly on the Kurdish side, and displaced at least 160,000 people. Hundreds of Syrian Kurds entered neighbouring Iraqi's Kurdish autonomous region Wednesday, mostly women and children.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019
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