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Turkish army shells Islamic State positions in Syria for second day Turkey tells border town to evacuate amid fire fights with Isis in Syria
(about 9 hours later)
Turkey has shelled Islamic State positions in Syria for a second day, as expectations grow of a major Ankara-backed offensive against the jihadis. Turkish authorities have ordered residents to evacuate the border town of Karkamış after it was hit by mortar rounds fired from an area of Syria controlled by Islamic State.
With tensions high on the Turkey-Syria border after the bombing of a wedding in the Turkish city of Gaziantep killed 54 people, howitzers hit Isis and Kurdish rebel targets across the frontier on Monday. The Turkish army responded by firing about 60 artillery shells on positions around Jarablus in Syria, amid preparations by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels to retake the Isis-controlled town.
In fighting on Tuesday, two mortar rounds fired from an Isis-controlled area in Syria hit the south-eastern Turkish town of Karkamış, Turkish television reported. Turkish artillery responded by firing about 60 shells on four positions around the Isis-controlled Syrian town of Jarablus, it said. Turkey announced a major offensive against Isis after a devastating explosion killed 54 people at a wedding in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, blamed the attack on the extremist group.
Turkey has had one of the bloodiest years in its modern history, facing a string of attacks by Isis and Kurdish militants and an attempted coup on 15 July. While the Turkish moves are likely to increase pressure on Isis in one of its last major redoubts, they are also likely to amplify an ongoing conflict between Ankara and Washington over the direction of the war, in particular whether the priority should be defeating Isis or preserving Syria’s territorial integrity.
The shelling came as Syrian activists said hundreds of Turkish-backed Syrian opposition fighters had gathered in the border area of Karkamış to prepare for an offensive to seize control of Jarablus. Now in the middle of its fifth year, Syria’s civil war took an unexpected turn earlier this month when Syrian Kurds who had been battling Isis turned their guns on forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad in the northern city of Hasakah. The move drew a quick response from Damascus, which sent jets to bomb Kurdish positions and forced Washington to scramble jets to defend its proxies and US special operations forces deployed alongside them.
This could potentially put them on a collision course with the militia of the Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD), which Ankara vehemently opposes. The PYD has its eyes on Jarablus after seizing the strategic Manbij area in northern Syria from Isis. The development underscores both the complexity and the stakes involved in Syria’s war, which has drawn in the region’s powers, laid much of the country to waste and forced a reshifting of longstanding alliances.
Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the Turkish shelling in Syria aimed to prevent the advance of troops backed by Kurds towards Jarablus. Turkey is furious at Washington’s use of Syrian Kurds as a ground force in an area over which they have claimed de facto autonomy, and has vowed to curtail Kurdish ambitions emerging from the chaos.
Abdulkadir Selvi, a well-connected columnist for the Hürriyet newspaper, said the Turkey-backed offensive could begin at any moment. “It is more important to them than fighting Isis,” said a western diplomat. “And that has been clear from the outset.
The plan has not been confirmed by the Turkish authorities but the foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said on Monday that the border area had to be “totally cleansed” of jihadis. “We have seen that whenever the Syrian Democratic Front [the Kurdish/Arab proxy force] get ahead, the Turks get more energised.”
The moves have come at a critical juncture for Turkey in Syria’s five and a half year war, with signs growing that it is on the verge of a landmark policy shift. A recent Turkish detente with Russia, following 10 months of conflict over Moscow’s robust support for the Syrian leader, stemmed from both sides’ belief that maintaining Syria’s current borders was paramount. Ankara agreed to compensate Moscow for shooting down a Russian jet that had entered Turkish air space from Syria last year.
Ankara has always said the ousting of Syria’s president is the key to ending the conflict, but this puts Turkey at odds with Bashar al-Assad’s main supporters, Iran and Russia. Over the weekend, however, the prime minister, Binali Yıldırım, acknowledged for the first time that Assad was one of the “actors” in Syria and may need to stay on as part of a transition. At the same time, Russia ordered the closure of a political office that Syria’s Kurds had established in Moscow. Over the past week, signs of common ground between Turkey and Syria – antagonists throughout much of the war – have also emerged.
On Monday, he urged world powers, including Iran, Russia and the US, to join together to rapidly open a “new page” in the Syria crisis. Amid unconfirmed reports that the Turkish intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, had visited Damascus, Syrian officials pointedly referred to the Syrian Kurdish political organisation, the PYD, as “PKK extremists”. Turkey says there is no difference between the Syrian body and the PKK, with whom it has been fighting for four decades inside its own borders.
“It is essential that all the parties come together to stop the bloodshed in Syria,” said Yıldırım, whose naming as prime minister earlier this year was seen as heralding a less confrontational Turkish foreign policy. Moscow last week sent a delegation to broker a truce between Damascus and the PYD’s military wing, the YPG, but returned without a result. The YPG has said it will not honour earlier agreements with Damascus, which saw both sides stay out of each other’s way for much of the war and over the past 10 months had seen Kurdish forces move into Arab areas of northern Syria under Russian air cover.
But he also said it was unacceptable for Kurds to seek to establish any kind of separate entity in northern Syria. Defeating Isis has been the dominant priority for the US, which had until now entered into a tacit non-aggression pact with Damascus, and has been willing to stay out of the way of Russia and Iran as they shore up the struggling Syrian leader.
Turkey regards PYD as a terrorist group, although Washington, Ankara’s ally in the fight against Isis, sees its militias – the powerful Kurdish People’s Protection Units – as having an important role in the fight. US officials have told allies in the region that Barack Obama wants one of the two Isis bastions – either Raqqa in Syria, or Mosul in Iraq – to have fallen by the time he leaves office. However, the Kurdish move on Hasakah is a wild card Washington had neither prepared for nor knows how to deal with.
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, is due to visit Ankara on Wednesday for talks with Turkey’s leadership, with Syria expected to be a crucial issue. “The Turks will not let this stand,” said an Ankara based western official. “The next few weeks are pivotal.”
There is confusion over who was behind the attack on a Kurdish wedding party in Gaziantep, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initially saying the suicide bomber was a child, aged 12-14, acting on the orders of Isis.
On Monday, however, Yıldırım said Turkey still did not know who carried out the attack and that all “rumours” about the age and affiliation of the bomber should be taken with a pinch of salt.