Turkish tanks roll into Syria to fight Kurdish militia

HASSA, Turkey: Turkish troops and tanks entered Syria on Sunday to push an offensive against Kurdish militia as France warned over the risks of the operation and rockets hit border towns in apparent retaliation.

Turkey on Saturday launched operation “Olive Branch” seeking to oust from the Afrin region of northern Syria the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) which Ankara considers a terror group.

But the campaign risks further increasing tensions with Turkey’s NATO ally the United States — which has supported the YPG in the fight against Islamic State (IS) jihadists — and also needs at least the tacit support of Russia to succeed.

France’s defence minister said it risked harming the campaign to crush IS, as Paris called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting to discuss the fighting.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said troops crossed into YPG-controlled region in Syria at 0805 GMT, the Dogan news agency reported.

Thirty-two Turkish planes destroyed a total of 45 targets including ammunition dumps and refuges used by the YPG on the second day of the operation, the Turkish army said.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in televised comments several villages had already been taken in the advance.

But a YPG spokesman claimed Turkish forces seeking to enter Afrin had been “blocked” and that it had hit two Turkish tanks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a total of 18 civilians had been killed so far in the two-day operation. Ankara denied any civilian casualties, with Cavusoglu accusing the YPG of sending out “nonsense propaganda and baseless lies“.

In his first comments on the offensive since it began, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed hope the “operation will be finished in a very short time” and vowed “we will not take a step back”.

Following calls from some Turkish pro-Kurdish politicians for people to take to the streets, he warned that anyone protesting in Turkey against the operation would pay “a heavy price”.

Police stopped demonstrations against the campaign taking place in the mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir and in Istanbul, making arrests, AFP correspondents said.

In a sign of the risks to Turkey, six rockets fired from Syria hit the Turkish border town of Reyhanli Sunday, killing one Syrian refugee and wounding 32 people, its mayor said.

Earlier, several rockets hit the Turkish border town of Kilis without causing fatalities.

The operation is Turkey’s second major incursion into Syria during the seven-year civil war after the August 2016-March 2017 Euphrates Shield campaign in an area to the east of Afrin, against both the YPG and IS. Turkey accuses the YPG of being the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has waged a rebellion in Turkey for more than three decades and is regarded as a terror group by Ankara and the EU and US.