ANKARA President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday said Turkish forces wouldsoon lay siege to Syria’s Afrin as a cross-border offensive targeting aKurdish militia entered its second month.
On January 20, Ankara launched an air and ground operation supportingSyrian rebels against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the Afrinregion of northern Syria.
Turkey views the YPG as a Syrian offshoot of the outlawed KurdistanWorkers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency against theTurkish state since 1984.
“In the coming days, swiftly, we will lay siege to the centre of the townof Afrin,” Erdogan told parliament.
While some analysts say Turkey and pro-Ankara Syrian rebels have made slowadvances, Erdogan defended the operation’s progress, saying the army wantedto avoid putting the lives of both its troops and civilians needlessly “atrisk”.
“We did not go there to burn it down,” he said, adding that the operation’saim was to “create a safe and liveable area”, where Syrian refugees inTurkey could conceivably return to.
Since Syria’s war erupted in 2011, more than 3.5 million people have soughtrefuge in Turkey.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, Syrian rebelsand Turkish forces have taken 45 villages since the start of the operation,most of them bordering Afrin.
And Turkish security expert Abdullah Agar said troops involved in operation“Olive Branch” had captured around 300 square kilometres (120 square miles)of territory.
Over the past month, 205 Syrian rebels have been killed, along with 219 YPGand allied fighters and 112 civilians, Observatory figures show.
The Turkish army says 32 of its troops have been killed since the offensivewas launched.
Ankara strongly denies there have been any civilian casualties.
*Warning to Damascus*
Jana Jabbour, a political science professor at Sciences Po university inParis, said the Turks were “struggling to move forward” because of the“organisation of the Kurdish YPG forces and their combativeness”.
She said it was important to distinguish between political rhetoric, “evenpolitical propaganda”, and the reality on the ground.
On the ground, fighting was now focused around the area of Arab Wiran innortheast Afrin, the Observatory said.
If captured, pro-Ankara forces would control 50 continuous kilometres ofAfrin’s northern border with Turkey. The operation looked like it was goingto be further complicated when Syrian state media reported thatpro-government forces were expected to enter Afrin to counter the Turkishoffensive.
In a thinly-veiled threat to Damascus, Erdogan on Tuesday warned Turkeywould tolerate no interference. “We will block the way of those who come tohelp from outside the city or the region,” he said.
Later, Erdogan told reporters that the Syrian regime would not send anyfighters.
Asked by a journalist if the regime backed down after Russian PresidentVladimir Putin and Erdogan spoke on the phone on Monday, the Turkish leadersaid without elaborating that the threat had been defused “afterdiscussions”, NTV broadcaster quoted him as saying.
*Strained ties with US*
The operation strained already difficult ties with Washington, which hasgiven weaponry to the YPG as part of its fight against Islamic Statejihadists in Syria.
The US has called on Turkey to show restraint, warning that the offensiverisks diluting the fight against the jihadists.
But instead of pulling back, Erdogan threatened to expand the offensive tothe YPG-held town of Manbij. When US Secretary of State Rex Tillersonvisited Ankara last week, the two sides agreed to work together in Syriaand set up working groups on issues like Manbij where American troops areoperating and which the US diplomat described as a “priority”.
In addition to its disagreements with Washington, Turkey must take intoaccount the interests of Russia, a key Damascus ally, which controlsnorthern Syrian airspace.
Moscow may have given the green light to the offensive, but it haspreviously closed the airspace to Turkish jets after a Russian plane wasshot down in an area of north Syria where Turkish military observers wereexpected to enforce a de-escalation zone.
The offensive is broadly supported in Turkey where political parties, mediaand clerics speak in unison, against a backdrop of nationalist rhetoric ledby Erdogan.
Only the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) does not back theoperation.
Since Olive Branch got under way, Turkey has detained 786 people, 587 ofwhom are being held for spreading “terror propaganda” on social media, theinterior ministry says, in what opponents charge is a crackdown on criticsof the operation.
Another 85 people have been held on charges of organising protests againstthe offensive.