Turkey pressed its deadly offensive against Kurdish targets in Syria on Friday as it battled to seize key border towns on the third day of an operation that has forced 100,000 civilians to flee. President Donald Trump, whose order to pull back US troops from the border this week effectively triggered the intervention, said Washington would now seek to broker a truce.
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper "strongly encouraged" Turkey to halt its offensive as a prelude to such negotiations but a Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan swiftly responded by vowing the assault 'won't stop'. The third such Turkish operation since the start of the war in Syria was met with fierce international condemnation over what many saw as the blatant betrayal of a faithful ally.
The Kurdish forces targeted by Turkey were the US-led coalition's main ground partner in years of battle against the Islamic State group and its now-defunct "caliphate". In Al-Hol, a camp holding relatives of IS suspects which lies outside the area targeted by Turkey, women started riots Friday that Kurdish forces swiftly put down.
The risk that thousands of the jihadists they still hold could break free on the back of the Turkish assault could yet spur the international community into action. But as the offensive went into its third day, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were fending for themselves, trying to repulse multiple ground attacks along a roughly 120 kilometre (75 mile) long segment of the border. "There is heavy fighting between the SDF and the Turks on different fronts, mostly from Tal Abyad to Ras al-Ain," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Britain-based war monitor said the Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies - mostly Sunni Arab ex-rebels - were deploying air strikes, heavy artillery and rocket fire. The monitor said four civilians were killed in Tal Abyad when an air strike hit the car in which they were fleeing the fighting, while another three were shot dead by snipers around the border town.
That brings the civilian death toll to 17 on the Syrian side, while 17 have also been killed in Turkey. That included eight civilians killed in a Turkish border town late Friday in what the local governor's office said was a Kurdish mortar attack. According to the Observatory, 54 SDF fighters have also been killed while Turkey has reported the deaths of four soldiers.
Outgunned Kurdish forces were putting up stiff resistance but experts predict they will not hold out very long without outside assistance. The Observatory and a Kurdish military source said several Arab families in the border area had sided with Turkey, raising sleeper cells to attack from behind SDF lines. Most of the 100,000 people the United Nations confirmed Friday had been displaced travelled east towards the city of Hasakeh, which has not been targeted by Turkey.
Erdogan wants to create a buffer between the border and territory controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces, who have links with Turkey's own Kurdish rebels. The violence was wreaking havoc across northeast Syria. One charity closed down a hospital it supported in Tal Abyad because the staff had fled and shelling led the Kurdish authorities to transfer an entire camp of people who had been displaced earlier in the Syrian war. Aid groups have warned of yet another humanitarian disaster in Syria's eight-year-old war if the offensive was not stopped.
France, which was the United States' top partner in the anti-IS coalition, has threatened sanctions against NATO member Turkey. Russian President Vladimir Putin said he doubted Turkey would be able to ensure IS prisoners stay behind bars. A car bomb also went off Friday in Qamishli, one of the main towns in the Kurdish region, killing at least six people, civilians and members of the security forces, officials and the Observatory said.
The attack, which targeted a restaurant in the town centre, was claimed by IS, which has taken responsibility for a string of such attacks in Qamishli and elsewhere recently. France called for a meeting of the anti-IS coalition to discuss growing fears that the jihadist organisation could regroup if Turkey's invasion creates a security vacuum. According to the Kurdish administration, some 12,000 men are held in seven detention centres across Kurdish-controlled areas.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019