This comes as Kurdish officials in Afrin and a Syrian monitoring group report cross-border daily clashes between the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Turkish military in the area, with both sides accusing one another for first initiating the fight.
Deputy Prime Minister Veysi Kaynak told reporters on Wednesday that Turkey has to act to protect its own security.
“Afrin has become a threat to the security of Turkey,” Kaynak said of the capital city of the Afrin canton in northern Syria. “In the past, most of the terrorists infiltrated into Turkey from this area and provided weapons to the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. That is why Afrin must be cleared from terrorists.”
Turkey considers the YPG as an extension of the outlawed PKK group which has waged an armed struggle against the Turkish state since 1980s. YPG denies it has any organic links with the PKK, a named terrorist organization by Turkey.
Kaynak also said that the Turkish military has to set up a military base in al-Bab, about 90 kilometers southeast of Afrin, to secure areas that came under the control of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels as part of its Euphrates Shield operation in northern Syria that concluded in March, after it captured several areas, including Jarablus, al-Bab, and Dabiq, all located in northern Syria from the ISIS militants over several months.
He added that the Turkish base is part of so-called de-escalation zones to be set up by Russia, Turkey, and Iran in different parts of the country, per an agreement reached in the Kazakh capital of Astana earlier this year with the eventual goal of stopping the six-year civil war that has claimed the lives of more than 400,000 people.
Mohamed Jamil, a co-chair of the human rights office in Afrin, told the YPG-affiliated media that Turkey does not respect international law.
“Turkey does not recognise the human rights, morale values, and good neighbourliness,” Jamil said, accusing Ankara of conducting a “scorched earth” strategy in northern Syrian since the beginning of the Syrian civil war about six years ago.
A statement from the Afrin foreign affairs office announced that while they are capable of fighting back against the Turkish troops, but that “they do not wish to open a new war front” as their priority is to drive out the ISIS militants in Raqqa.
The statement called on Turkey to withdraw from the northern Syria to save lives and asked the international community to prevent the Turkish intervention in Afrin.
Kurds have three self-administered cantons located along Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey, collectively known as Rojava or officially called the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. Afrin canton in the west is separated from the eastern cantons of Kobane and Cizre by a 100 kilometre-long stretch that is now under control of Turkey and its allied militias. The lands between Afrin and Kobane cantons are demographically mixed.
Afrin is bordered by Turkey to the north and west, rebel groups to the southwest, regime forces to the southeast, and Turkish-backed forces to the east. Kurdish attempts to link Afrin with Kobane and Cizre were thwarted last summer when Turkey began backing the FSA west of the Euphrates.
Kurdish officials in Syria announced in May their intention to link the Kurdish region of Rojava to the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to establish a trade route that could improve their economy once ISIS is defeated in the region.
Hediya Yousef, in charge of the federalism project for the self-declared democratic federation said then that, “Arriving at the Mediterranean Sea is in our project for northern Syria.”
The Mediterranean Sea lies about 100 kilometers from Afrin, one of three cantons ruled by the democratic federation.
If the Syrian Kurdish population were to carry out this plan, they would first need approval from the Syrian regime’s president Bashar al-Assad in addition to an agreement with Russia, Assad’s strongest ally, since the other Kurdish-held eastern cantons are not linked to Afrin and therefore need to cross territories currently held by Syrian regime.
As part of extra security measures, Turkey began constructing a wall with Syria in 2014 with President Erdogan saying in early June they had already completed 650 kilometers on the country’s 911-kilometer border with Syria.
