Turkey insisted that foreigners fighting for the Kurds were “on their own” if they chose to join the battle in Afrin as Ankara deployed more troops to the border.
A troop of foreign fighters led by a Huang Lei, a British citizen of Chinese extraction, is heading to Afrin to join the battle against an assault by Turkish tanks and local Syrian Arab allies, the Kurdish militia (YPG) said yesterday.
Britain and America are working alongside the YPG in the war against Isis in eastern Syria, but Turkey, a Nato ally, is another matter. The YPG is the Syrian affiliate of the PKK, the guerrilla group that has been waging a long insurgency inside Turkey and is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by both the UK and the United States.
The Turkish state news agency, Anadolou, today quoted the Pentagon as saying YPG fighters no longer had its backing if they went from the eastern part of Kurdish-led territory to fight in Kurdish-held Afrin to the west.
“If they carry out military operations of any kind that are not specifically focused on Isis they will not have coalition support,” it quoted Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesman, as saying. “Let’s say for example, a unit of YPG says, ‘Hey, we’ll no longer fight Isis and we are going to support our brothers in Afrin’, then they are on their own. They are not our partners any more.”
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The United States and its coalition partners have found themselves caught in the middle of the long and bitter ideological and physical conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, the leftwing Kurdish faction. The YPG, an acronym for People’s Protection Units, was founded in 2004 after unrest in Kurdish areas of Syria, but operates effectively and sometimes literally under PKK banners.
Many of the foreign fighters who have flocked in their hundreds to join the YPG did so to take on Isis, particularly in response to the militants’ beheading videos and other atrocities. However, some have taken up the YPG’s beliefs, and are determined to stay and help it set up a mini-state in Syria according to the philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s leader, who is in jail in Turkey.
“We are prepared and have been supplied by the YPG to fight against Turkish terrorists” a spokesman for Huang Lei’s squad said in a video posted online.
Turkey today sent more special forces and tanks to the border with Syria, amid signs that its attack on Afrin was getting bogged down. Turkey’s local allies, mostly former members of the Free Syrian Army who have long battled for control of mixed Arab and Kurdish neighbourhoods, occupy only four small footholds on the edges of the Afrin pocket.
Meanwhile, Turkish leaders have ratcheted up their rhetoric against the eastern part of the Kurdish territories, where 2,000 Americans and a number of British and other allied forces are based alongside the YPG.
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President Erdogan said he wanted to root out “the last terrorist”, including from all of the quarter of Syrian territory jointly occupied by the US, the YPG and other local allies.
He said he would start with Manbij, a heavily contested city presently under YPG military control with American troops nearby. A majority Arab town, its capture by Kurdish-led forces particularly angered the FSA and Mr Erdogan.
He said this morning he intended to “foil games along our borders starting from Manbij”.
