Turkey and northern Syria continue their exchange of attacks. This Monday, a “response attack” by Syrian Kurds against a city in southern Turkey left at least two dead and six injured. Something that has set off alarm bells in Turkey, which has promised a “strong response” and is even considering sending a ground operation to northern Syria.
Attacks between Turkey and northern Syria come and go. This Monday, the most recent one claimed the lives of at least two people and left six injured in Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, after five explosives fell for which Ankara directly blamed the Syrian Kurdish militia.
One of the shells landed near a school in the town of Karkamis, shattering the window panes of the teachers’ lounge and killing one of the teachers inside. The other fatality was a five-year-old boy, when another rocket hit his home in Karkamis.
“YPG/PKK terrorists fired five rockets from northern Syria, killing two people and injuring six others in the Turkish province of Gaziantep,” Davut Gul, the region’s governor, said on social media.
Terör örgütü tarafından Fırat’ın doğusundan Karkamış ilçe merkezine 5 adat havan/roket atılmıştır.
Sivil yerleşim merkezlerine isabet eden saldırıda;
2 hemşehrimiz vefat etmiştir.
2’si ağır olmak üzere 6 vatandaşımız yaralanmıştır.Ayrıntılı bilgi daha sonra paylaşılacaktır.
— Davut GÜL (@gul_davut) November 21, 2022
But this attack independently verified by the Syrian Observatory for Human RightsIt doesn’t come from nowhere. The Turkish Army was attacking Kurdish positions in northern Syria, controlled by the YPG – Kurdish Popular Protection Units, led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – throughout the weekend, with dozens of deaths in the region.
An attack justified as a “response” to his alleged authorship in an attack in Istanbul, which left at least six dead on November 13. All despite the fact that the YPG reiterated that it had nothing to do with the events and wished a “speedy recovery” to the wounded.
Now, the Turkish Army has not been long in coming. The same Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that Turkish forces have already started their counter-offensive in Syria, with attacks on the Tal Rifaat district and three villages in the northern Aleppo countryside.
Something that the Turkish military forces have not confirmed, but they have issued a threat of reprisals for the attacks.
“Traitors who continue their attacks on innocent civilians such as students or teachers, and show cowardice to attack even schools will be held accountable for their actions. The Turkish Armed Forces are responding to the attacks in different ways,” the Defense Ministry said after the attacks in Gaziantep.
Çocuk, yaşlı; öğrenci-öğretmen demeden, masum sivillere yönelik saldırılarını sürdüren, okulları dahi hedef alma alçaklığını gösteren hainlerden yaptıklarının hesabı soruldu, sorulmaya devam ediyor.
TSK, saldırılara misliyle karşılık veriyor.
#Hesapzamanı pic.twitter.com/6NJgInCz9S— TC Millî Savunma Bakanlığı (@tcsavunma) November 21, 2022
And this conflict could go even further. The same president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has assured that his country is considering launching a ground operation in northern Syria, that is, sending troops on the ground.
“The competent units, our Ministry of Defense and our general staff will decide together on the power with which our ground forces must act (…) We have already warned: those who bother us on our territory will pay,” Erdogan told reporters in a flight from Qatar to Turkey.
Something that could escalate the conflict not only in northern Syria, but also in northern Iraq and further destabilize the region.
The enmity between Turkey and the Kurds of northern Syria
“They are terrorist groups” is the mantra that the Turkish administration has repeated countless times regarding the Kurds in northern Syria.
And here is a very important point: the YPG has direct and close relations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), declared enemy of Turkey.
Turkey and the PKK, which has claimed independence from Turkish Kurdistan in an armed insurgency since the 1980s, have fought an internal conflict for years that has already killed nearly 40,000 people. For Ankara, the PKK and YPG are the same.
In fact, during airstrikes this weekend, in which Turkey destroyed 89 YPG positions, it claimed that large numbers of what it calls “terrorists” were killed in the attack.
Since 2016, Turkey has already launched three major incursions into northern Syria and controls part of the territory, with hundreds of airstrikes killing thousands of civilians in the area.
While Ankara and Washington consider the PKK a terrorist group, they disagree on the status of the YPG. And it is that although for Turkey they are a nuisance for their territorial claims, they serve the United States as allies for a common cause: the fight against the Islamic State in Syria under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey, by contrast, has supported rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and cut diplomatic relations with Damascus early in the Syrian civil war.
However, with relations between the United States and Turkey under a very fine rope for years, this Monday the United States Embassy in the country shared the mourning for the attack and condemned it.
“We strongly condemn this violent and unjustified attack,” they pointed out from the Embassy on social networks.
The US Mission joins the people of Türkiye in mourning the three innocent lives lost today in Karkamis. We strongly condemn this violent and unjustified attack.
— US Embassy Turkey (@USEmbassyTurkey) November 21, 2022
In the midst of the tension, between the calls for calm by the international community and the mutual attacks that seem to have no end, many experts ask themselves a question: will Turkey invade northern Syria?
With EFE, Reuters, AP and local media
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