(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Turkey has said it will carry out more strikes on a Syrian Kurdish militia if it fails to retreat beyond the Euphrates river.
Turkish forces pressed on with a two-pronged operation inside Syria against the so-called Islamic State takfiris and the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), shelling more than a dozen targets.
Strikes against the YPG are hugely sensitive as the Kurdish group, seen by Ankara as a terror group, is allied with the US in the fight against Isis in Syria.
Ankara said it had killed 25 Kurdish “terrorists” in strikes on YPG positions on Sunday, a day after a Turkish soldier died in a rocket attack allegedly by the militia.
Washington said the clashes were “unacceptable” and urged an immediate de-escalation.
Turkey’s operation aims to push the YPG back across the Euphrates to prevent it from joining up a region east of the river that is already under its control with a Kurdish-held area to the west.
Last week the US vice-president, Joe Biden, said Washington had told the YPG to go back across the Euphrates or risk losing American support. But Ankara says it had seen no evidence of the militia doing so.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said: “The YPG … needs to cross east of the Euphrates as soon as possible. So long as they don’t, they will be a target.
“In the places where it has moved, the YPG forces everyone out – including Kurds – who do not think like it does, and carries out ethnic cleansing.”
Çavuşoğlu said the ethnic composition of the area around the city of Manbij, west of the Euphrates, captured by the YPG from Isis this month, was largely Arab.
He said those who had lived in the area before fighting broke out should return rather than lose out to new Kurdish migrants.
The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in UK said at least 40 civilians were killed in Turkish shelling and airstrikes on Sunday. Ankara strongly rejected the claims.
NTV television said that Turkish artillery had shelled 15 targets in northern Syria on Monday. It did not say which group was targeted.
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