Turkey shifting Syria strategy after Kurdish militia’s attacks

Turkey is ‘already in a tense relationship with Russia over Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province and would not like to add a new layer to these tensions.’ (Reuters/File)
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Updated 19 October 2021
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Turkey shifting Syria strategy after Kurdish militia’s attacks

  • The militia has engaged in a cross-border shelling campaign against nearby Turkish villages

ANKARA: Turkey is shifting to a proxy force strategy and diplomacy with the US and Russia to counter the Kurdish People’s Defense Units in Syria instead of deploying its own troops, analysts have said.
It comes after senior Turkish officials hinted at a strategy change regarding the war-torn country following deadly attacks by the militia in the Kurdish-dominated Tal Rifaat region, which targeted Turkish police officers.
The militia has also engaged in a cross-border shelling campaign against nearby Turkish villages.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Ankara was “determined to remove all threats in northern Syria,” while Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu pledged that Turkey “would do what is necessary for its security,” adding that neither the US or Russia had kept their promises to ensure the withdrawal of the militia from the Syrian border.
But the Turkish government has said that the military will pursue a “much more different campaign” in northern Syria, sparking debate over whether Ankara will engage in diplomatic talks with the US and Russia before launching possible military action.
The militia is the chief local partner of the US in its fight against Daesh in the region, while Turkey considers the Kurdish group and its political wing, the Democratic Union Party, as Syrian extensions of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has fought a civil war against the Turkish state for more than three decades.
In the meantime, the Syrian Liberation Front branch of the Syrian National Army said that it is “determined to clear our regions from all terror groups,” including the Kurdistan Workers’s Party, Democratic Union Party and Daesh.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute, said that every time Russian President Vladimir Putin has allowed Turkey to enter Syria and seize territory from the Kurdish militia, he has demanded that Turkey end its support for rebel groups.
“This involved a land exchange with either Turkey taking territories from the YPG (Kurdish People’s Defense Units in Syria) or the Bashar Assad regime taking territories from the hands of the rebels. But this new model that we are talking right now is a bit different from this one. Now, Turkish-backed troops in Syria, instead of Turkish troops, might move in to take an area from the YPG with a tacit agreement from Putin,” he told Arab News.
According to Cagaptay, Ankara’s broader strategy is to divide the militia-controlled zones and prevent the formation of any future political entity in the group’s territory.
“The recent Erdogan-Putin deal in Sochi aimed at implementing this new model,” he said.
Amid particularly sensitive times for US-Turkey relations, a growing emphasis on diplomatic channels outweighs military action, he added. Erdogan is expected to discuss the issue with US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome at the end of October.
After their recent meeting in Sochi, Erdogan will also talk to Putin following his meeting with Biden.
According to Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund of the US, the threat that Turkey sees in the Kurdish militia is the possibility of a Kurdish state being formed close to its borders.
“Ankara is therefore taking whatever measures it can to prevent this from happening,” he told Arab News.
Unluhisarcikli said that current conditions mean that it is unsuitable for Turkey to conduct military operations against YPG-held territories in northwest or northeast Syria.
Therefore, Ankara will push diplomatic channels to proceed efficiently, he added.
“Turkey is already in a tense relationship with Russia over Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province and would not like to add a new layer to these tensions. At a time when Turkey is trying to improve relations with US, it would not like to introduce a new headache,” he said.
Meanwhile, during a press conference last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the Biden administration does not support efforts to normalize relations with the Assad regime.
Experts also note that the fate of Idlib province, hosting about 4 million civilians under the control of Turkish-backed rebels, will be critical in the coming days in shaping the calculus of Turkey’s relationship with Syria, with a potential migrant influx causing domestic political worries for Ankara.
On Saturday, shelling by regime forces of the opposition-held town of Sarmada on the northern outskirts of Idlib near the Turkish border killed four people and wounded more than a dozen, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.


Gaza rescuers say 15 killed in Israeli strikes

Updated 18 April 2025
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Gaza rescuers say 15 killed in Israeli strikes

  • On Thursday the civil defense agency reported the deaths of at least 40 residents in Israeli strikes

Gaza City: Gaza’s civil defense agency said Friday that 15 people, including 10 from the same family, had been killed in two overnight Israeli strikes.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said on Telegram that “our crews recovered the bodies of 10 martyrs and a large number of wounded from the house of the Baraka family and the neighboring houses targeted by the Israeli occupation forces in the Bani Suhaila area east of Khan Yunis,” in the southern Gaza Strip.
Bassal later announced that a separate strike hit two houses in northern Gaza’s Tal Al-Zaatar, where crews had “recovered the bodies of five people.”
The Israeli military, which did not immediately comment, has intensified its aerial bombardments and expanded its ground operations in the Gaza Strip since it resumed its offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory on March 18.
On Thursday, the civil defense agency reported the deaths of at least 40 residents in Israeli strikes, most of them in camps for displaced civilians, as Israel pressed its offensive.


Israeli military intercepts missile launched from Yemen

Updated 18 April 2025
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Israeli military intercepts missile launched from Yemen

  • Iran-backed Houthi militia have regularly fired missiles and drones targeting Israel

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Friday it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen, from where the Iran-backed Houthi militia have regularly fired missiles and drones targeting Israel.
“Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in several areas in Israel, a missile launched from Yemen was intercepted,” Israel’s army said on Telegram, adding that aerial defense systems had been deployed “to intercept the threat.”


US strike on Yemen fuel port kills at least 38, Houthi media say

Updated 18 April 2025
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US strike on Yemen fuel port kills at least 38, Houthi media say

WASHINGTON: US strikes on a fuel port in Yemen killed at least 38 people on Thursday, Houthi-run media said, one of the deadliest days since the United States began its attacks on the Iran-backed militants.

The United States has vowed not to halt the large-scale strikes begun last month in its biggest military operation in the Middle East since President Donald Trump took office in January, unless the Houthis cease attacks on Red Sea shipping.

Al Masirah TV said 102 people were also wounded in Thursday’s strikes on the western fuel port of Ras Isa, which the US military said aimed to cut off a source of fuel for the Houthi militant group.

Responding to a Reuters query for comment on the Houthis’ casualty figure and its own estimate, the US Central Command said it had none beyond the initial announcement of the attacks.

“The objective of these strikes was to degrade the economic source of power of the Houthis, who continue to exploit and bring great pain upon their fellow countrymen,” it had said in a post on X.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have launched dozens of drone and missile attacks on vessels transiting the waterway, saying they were targeting ships linked to Israel in protest over the war in Gaza.

They halted attacks on shipping lanes during a two-month ceasefire in Gaza. Although they vowed to resume strikes after Israel renewed its assault on Gaza last month, they have not claimed any since.

In March, two days of US attacks killed more than 50 people, Houthi officials said.


Cash crunch leaves Syrians queueing for hours to collect salaries

Updated 18 April 2025
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Cash crunch leaves Syrians queueing for hours to collect salaries

  • Syria has been struggling to emerge from the wake of nearly 14 years of civil war, and its banking sector is no exception
  • The liquidity crisis has forced authorities to drastically limit cash withdrawals, leaving much of the population struggling to make ends meet

DAMASCUS: Seated on the pavement outside a bank in central Damascus, Abu Fares’s face is worn with exhaustion as he waits to collect a small portion of his pension.
“I’ve been here for four hours and I haven’t so much as touched my pension,” said the 77-year-old, who did not wish to give his full name.
“The cash dispensers are under-stocked and the queues are long,” he continued.
Since the overthrow of president Bashar Assad last December, Syria has been struggling to emerge from the wake of nearly 14 years of civil war, and its banking sector is no exception.
Decades of punishing sanctions imposed on the Assad dynasty – which the new authorities are seeking to have lifted – have left about 90 percent of Syrians under the poverty line, according to the United Nations.
The liquidity crisis has forced authorities to drastically limit cash withdrawals, leaving much of the population struggling to make ends meet.
Prior to his ousting, Assad’s key ally Russia held a monopoly on printing banknotes. The new authorities have only announced once that they have received a shipment of banknotes from Moscow since Assad’s overthrow.
In a country with about 1.25 million public sector employees, civil servants must queue at one of two state banks or affiliated ATMs to make withdrawals, capped at about 200,000 Syrian pounds, the equivalent on the black market of $20 per day.
In some cases, they have to take a day off just to wait for the cash.
“There are sick people, elderly... we can’t continue like this,” said Abu Fares.
“There is a clear lack of cash, and for that reason we deactivate the ATMs at the end of the workday,” an employee at a private bank said, preferring not to give her name.
A haphazard queue of about 300 people stretches outside the Commercial Bank of Syria. Some are sitting on the ground.
Afraa Jumaa, a civil servant, said she spends most of the money she withdraws on the travel fare to get to and from the bank.
“The conditions are difficult and we need to withdraw our salaries as quickly as possible,” said the 43-year-old.
“It’s not acceptable that we have to spend days to withdraw meagre sums.”
The local currency has plunged in value since the civil war erupted in 2011, prior to which the dollar was valued at 50 pounds.
Economist Georges Khouzam explained that foreign exchange vendors – whose work was outlawed under Assad – “deliberately reduced cash flows in Syrian pounds to provoke rapid fluctuations in the market and turn a profit.”
Muntaha Abbas, a 37-year-old civil servant, had to return three times to withdraw her entire salary of 500,000 pounds.
“There are a lot of ATMs in Damascus, but very few of them work,” she said.
After a five-hour wait, she was finally able to withdraw 200,000 pounds.
“Queues and more queues... our lives have become a series of queues,” she lamented.


Trump administration orders Gaza-linked social media vetting for visa applicants

Updated 18 April 2025
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Trump administration orders Gaza-linked social media vetting for visa applicants

  • New order sent to all US diplomatic missions
  • Social media vetting includes NGO workers

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration on Thursday ordered a social media vetting for all US visa applicants who have been to the Gaza Strip on or after January 1, 2007, an internal State Department cable seen by Reuters showed, in the latest push to tighten screening of foreign travelers.
The order to conduct a social media vetting for all immigrant and non-immigrant visas should include non-governmental organization workers as well as individuals who have been in the Palestinian enclave for any length of time in an official or diplomatic capacity, the cable said.
“If the review of social media results uncovers potential derogatory information relating to security issues, then a SAO must be submitted,” the cable said, referring to a security advisory opinion, which is an interagency investigation to determine if a visa applicant poses a national security risk to the United States.
The cable was sent to all US diplomatic and consular posts.
The move comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has revoked hundreds of visas across the country, including the status of some lawful permanent residents under a 1952 law allowing the deportation of any immigrant whose presence in the country the secretary of state deems harmful to US foreign policy.
The cable dated April 17 was signed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said in late March that he may have revoked more than 300 visas already.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump officials have said student visa holders are subject to deportation over their support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, calling their actions a threat to US foreign policy interests.
Trump’s critics have called the effort an attack on free speech rights under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech for everyone in the US, regardless of immigration status. But there have been high-profile instances of the administration revoking visas of students who advocated against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Among the most widely publicized of such arrests was one captured on video last month of masked agents taking a Tufts University student from Turkiye, Rumeysa Ozturk, into custody.
When asked about Ozturk at a news conference last month, Rubio said: “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas” and he warned there would be more individuals whose visas could be revoked.