ANKARA: The Turkish president promised on Sunday to clear the entire Syrian border of “terrorists” after Ankara urged Washington to withdraw its military from a Kurdish-held town.
The call followed new commitments from the US to cease supplying weapons to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkey has been fighting in northern Syria for more than a week.
As Turkish troops intensified the Olive Branch operation in Afrin on Sunday, Turkey continued to warn that the offensive would move eastwards to Manbij, where hundreds of US troops are based.
“The terrorists in Afrin and Manbij cannot run from the painful end that awaits them,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan told members of his party in northern Turkey.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday it was “compulsory for the US to withdraw from Manbij as soon as possible.”
Turkey says an offensive against Manbij, about 100 km from the current operation, is an extension of its plan to remove what it describes as a terror threat along its border with Syria.
But if it goes ahead, the offensive would move the Turkish operation into a new level of military and diplomatic complexity, pulling in different groups and parties in the area.
H.R. McMaster, national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, spoke with Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser on Saturday to attempt to rebuild broken trust between the two countries.
According to Turkish press reports, McMaster repeated that weapons will no longer be delivered to the YPG. The same commitment was given many times to Ankara in recent months by both Trump and his Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Manbij is located 30 km west of the Euphrates and was captured from Daesh by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in 2016. The SDF are backed by the US and dominated by the YPG.
The town, which has a mixed ethnic population including Arabs and Kurds, has been one of the main fronts for the anti-Daesh coalition’s ground war. Following its liberation, the Pentagon preferred that the YPG remained in the town to guard it against a potential Daesh counter attack.
But Ankara is concerned that the Syrian Kurdish militias want to establish a corridor to the Mediterranean coast by linking the regions they administer.
Turkey has called for the YPG to be withdrawn from Manbij and has been enraged by the US support for the group. The militia is an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is seen by Ankara and many Western countries as a terror group. The US and Turkey are suppose to be allies through their memberships of NATO.
“It is unthinkable for a strategic ally to arm and train what its decades long strong ally consider to be a terrorist organization,” Mehmet Ogutcu, a former diplomat and chairman of the Bosphorus Energy Club, told Arab News.
He said Turkey’s request for the US to withdraw from Manbij is to avoid completely rupturing ties between the two countries.
Dr. Eray Gucluer, a terror expert from Altinbas University in Istanbul and at the think tank ASAM, said: “The US is currently losing power and prestige in the region, and it wouldn’t afford keeping its soldiers in Manbij if Turkey conducts an operation.”
Ali Semin, a Middle East expert at Istanbul-based think-tank BILGESAM, thinks Turkey would prefer to resolve the Manbij situation through agreement with the US.
“There will probably be no military offensive or Turkey may use Free Syrian Army fighters to avoid any direct clash with the US if the American soldiers remain there. It was the same case when Turkey agreed with Russia before the operation to Afrin as Russian troops were deployed in the region,” he told Arab News.
As concern grows over Manbij, fighting ramped up in Afrin on Sunday, with Turkish troops and allied Syrian fighters capturing a strategic hill.
AP reported that constant shelling and clashes could be heard at the Turkish border town Kilis as Turkish aircraft whizzed above and plumes of smoke rose in the distance.
The Turkish forces have been trying to capture Bursayah hill since the offensive started on Jan. 20.
The Turkish military said its soldiers and allied Syrian opposition fighters captured the hill, assisted by airstrikes, attack helicopters, armed drones and howitzers.
“In its previous cross-border operation, Turkey’s aim was to secure a safe zone to resettle the Syrians who fled war in their country, but this time Turkey wants to clear these zones completely from all kinds of terror threat until the border with Iraq,” Semin said.
“Manbij bears a strategic importance for Kurdish militia to reach the Mediterranean shores. It is exactly the establishment of such a YPG-controlled ‘terror corridor’ that Ankara wants to block along its border.”
Erdogan vows to clear ‘terrorists’ from Manbij
Erdogan vows to clear ‘terrorists’ from Manbij
Trump says Fed’s rate cut was ‘political move’
WASHINGTON: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday the US Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates by half of a percentage point was “a political move.”
“It really is a political move. Most people thought it was going to be half of that number, which probably would have been the right thing to do,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday kicked off what is expected to be a series of interest rate cuts with an unusually large half-percentage-point reduction.
Trump said last month that US presidents should have a say over decisions made by the Federal Reserve.
The Fed chair and the other six members of its board of governors are nominated by the president, subject to confirmation by the Senate. The Fed enjoys substantial operational independence to make policy decisions that wield tremendous influence over the direction of the world’s largest economy and global asset markets.
Gaza ceasefire deal unlikely in Biden’s term, WSJ reports
WASHINGTON: US officials now believe that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza is unlikely before President Joe Biden leaves office in January, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The newspaper cited top-level officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon without naming them. Those bodies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“I can tell you that we do not believe that deal is falling apart,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday before the report was published.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.
The United States and mediators Qatar and Egypt have for months attempted to secure a ceasefire but have failed to bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.
Two obstacles have been especially difficult: Israel’s demand to keep forces in the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt and the specifics of an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The United States has said a Gaza ceasefire deal could lower tensions across the Middle East amid fears the conflict could widen.
Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 that he said at the time Israel agreed to. As the talks hit obstacles, officials have for weeks said a new proposal would soon be presented.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Macron says ‘diplomatic path exists’ in Lebanon
PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that a “diplomatic path exists” in Lebanon, where fears of an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel spiked after deadly explosions of hand-held devices.
War is “not inevitable” and “nothing, no regional adventure, no private interest, no loyalty to any cause merits triggering a conflict in Lebanon,” Macron said in a video to the Lebanese people posted on social media.
Sweden charges woman with genocide, crimes against humanity in Syria
- Daesh ‘tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,’ prosecutor Reena Devgun says
DENMARK: Swedish authorities have charged a 52-year-old woman associated with the Daesh group with genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria — in the first such case of a person to be tried in the Scandinavian country.
Lina Laina Ishaq, who’s a Swedish citizen, allegedly committed the crimes from August 2014 to December 2016 in Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed Daesh caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.
The crimes “took place under Daesh rule in Raqqa, and this is the first time that Daesh attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden,” senior prosecutor Reena Devgun said in a statement.
“Women, children, and men were regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labor, deprivation of liberty, and extrajudicial executions,” Devgun said.
When announcing the charges, Devgun said that they were able to identify the woman through information from UNITAD, the UN team investigating atrocities in Iraq.
Daesh “tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,” Devgun said.
In a separate statement, the Stockholm District Court said the prosecutor claims the woman detained a number of women and children belonging to the Yazidi ethnic group in her residence in Raqqa and “allegedly exposed them to, among other things, severe suffering, torture or other inhumane treatment as well as for persecution by depriving them of fundamental rights for cultural, religious and gender reasons contrary to general international law.”
According to the charge sheet, Ishaq is suspected of holding nine people, including children, in her Raqqa home for up to seven months and treating them as slaves. She also abused several of those she held captive.
The charge sheet said that Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, is accused of having molested a baby, said to have been one month old at the time, by holding a hand over the child’s mouth when he screamed to make him shut up.
She is also suspected of having sold people to Daesh, knowing they risked being killed or subjected to serious sexual abuse.
In 2014, Daesh stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.
The woman earlier had been convicted in Sweden and was sentenced to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, an area that Daesh then controlled.
The woman claimed she had told the child’s father that she and the boy were only going on holiday to Turkiye. However, once in Turkiye, the two crossed into Syria and the Daesh-run territory.
In 2017, when Daesh’s reign began to collapse, she fled from Raqqa and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops. She managed to escape to Turkiye, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime, with a Daesh foreign fighter from Tunisia.
She was extradited from Turkiye to Sweden.
Before her 2021 conviction, the woman lived in the southern town of Landskrona.
The court said the trial was planned to start Oct. 7 and last approximately two months.
Large parts of the trial are to be held behind closed doors.
Israel violated global child rights treaty in Gaza, UN committee says
GENEVA: A UN committee has accused Israel of severe breaches of a global treaty protecting children’s rights, saying its military actions in Gaza had a catastrophic impact on them and are among the worst violations in recent history.
Palestinian health authorities say 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7. Of those killed in Gaza, at least 11,355 are children, Palestinian data shows, and thousands more are injured.
“The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history,” said Bragi Gudbrandsson, vice chair of the Committee.
“I don’t think we have seen a violation that is so massive before as we’ve seen in Gaza. These are extremely grave violations that we do not often see,” he said.
Israel, which ratified the treaty in 1991, sent a large delegation to the UN hearings in Geneva between September 3-4.
They argued that the treaty did not apply in Gaza or the West Bank and that it was committed to respecting international humanitarian law. It says its military campaign in Gaza is aimed at eliminating Hamas.
The committee praised Israel for attending but said it “deeply regrets the state party’s repeated denial of its legal obligations.”
The 18-member UN Committee monitors countries’ compliance with the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child — a widely adopted treaty that protects them from violence and other abuses.
In its conclusions, it called on Israel to provide urgent assistance to thousands of children maimed or injured by the war, provide support for orphans, and allow more medical evacuations from Gaza.
The UN body has no means of enforcing its recommendations, although countries generally aim to comply.
During the hearings, the UN experts also asked many questions about Israeli children, including details about those taken hostage by Hamas, to which Israel’s delegation gave extensive responses.
