US President Donald Trump and Tukey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan
US Vice President Mike Pence announced Thursday that the US and Turkey had agreed to a five-day ceasefire in northern Syria to allow for a Kurdish withdrawal from a security zone roughly 20 miles south of the Turkish border, in what appeared to be a significant embrace of Turkey's position in the week-long conflict.
Earlier, Erdogan had vowed that Turkey's operation would continue, despite US President Donald Trump demanding a ceasefire. The offensive was facilitated by the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria.
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Erdogan's declaration came as an extraordinary letter emerged in which Trump warned Erdogan: "Don't be a fool".
Erdogan said the only way to solve Syria's problems was for the Kurdish forces to "lay down their arms... destroy all their traps and get out of the safe zone that we have designated".
After more than four hours of negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey's invasion of Syria, and remained silent on whether the agreement amounted to another abandonment of the US's former Kurdish allies in the fight against the Islamic State.
Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the US from the area.
Pence and Secretary of State Mile Pompeo lauded the deal as a significant achievement, and Trump tweeted that it was "a great day for civilization."
But the agreement essentially gives the Turks what they had sought to achieve with their military operation in the first place. After the Kurdish forces are cleared from the safe zone, Turkey has committed to a permanent ceasefire but is under no obligation to withdraw its troops.
Kurdish forces, on Wednesday, struck a desperate deal with Damascus and stepped aside to allow Syrian regime troops and allied Russian soldiers enter the border town of Kobane, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Kobane is a highly symbolic town for Syria's Kurds, whose forces had in 2015 wrested it from the Islamic State group in an epic battle backed by the US-led coalition.
Head of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic force, Mazloum Abdi told Kurdish television channel Ronahi it would make do with “defensive” operations against the group, which maintains sleeper cells and a presence in Syria's vast desert despite its territorial defeat. The group also added that they were “freezing” operations against IS.
In addition, the deal gives Turkey relief from sanctions the administration had imposed and threatened to impose since the invasion began, meaning there will be no penalty for the operation.
Kurdish forces were not party to the agreement, and it was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Before the talks, the Kurds indicated they would object to any agreement along the lines of what was announced by Pence. But Pence maintained that the US had obtained "repeated assurances from them that they'll be moving out." Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the US and European Union, designate as a terrorist organisation
-Inputs from PTI
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