Turkey says its forces won’t stay in Syria’s Afrin region

ANKARA: Turkish forces will withdraw from the Syrian border region of Afrin, leaving it to its "real owners", once it has been cleared of "terrorists", Turkey said on Monday.

Turkey and its Syrian rebel allies swept into the regional capital, also called Afrin, on Sunday, raising their flags in the town centre and declaring full control after an eight-week campaign against the Kurdish YPG militia. "We are not permanent there (in Afrin) and we are certainly not invaders.

Our goal is to hand the region back to its real owners after clearing it of terrorists," Bekir Bozdag, a deputy prime minister, told reporters. The fight for Afrin, a once-stable pocket of north west Syria, has opened a new front in the country´s multi-sided civil war and highlighted the ever-greater role of foreign powers such as Turkey. More than 150,000 people have fled Afrin in recent days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said.

Bozdag said the capture of the town of Afrin as part of Turkey´s ´Operation Olive Branch´ had significantly reduced threats to its borders. It is Turkey´s second cross-border operation into Syria during that country´s seven-year civil war.

The first operation, dubbed "Euphrates Shield", targeted what Ankara called a "terror corridor" made up of Islamic State and Kurdish fighters further east from Afrin along its southern frontier with Syria.