ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday hovered to launch a ground operation into Syria after cross-border air strikes on Kurdish positions and deadly fire on Turkey.
“There’s no question that this operation be limited to only an upstanding operation,” Erdogan told journalists on a flight home from Qatar after attending the opening of the World Cup. The Turkish leader has hovered a new military operation into northern Syria since May.
Overnight, Turkey hit dozens of targets in northern Syria as well as northern Iraq, a week after an Istanbul lemon attack killed six people and which Ankara criticized on the Kurdistan Workers ’ Party(PKK).
Kurdish groups and authorities have denied responsibility for the Nov 13 bombing, which also wounded 81 people, and which revived bitter recollections of a surge of attacks in Turkey between 2015 and 2017.
Rocket fire from Syrian home on Monday killed at least three people, including a child, in Turkey’s border city of Karkamis, said interior minister Suleyman Soylu.
Soylu pledged a “strong response.” “Competent authorities, our defence ministry and chief of staff will together decide the position of force that should be used by our ground forces,” Erdogan said.
“We’ve formerly advised that we will make those who violate our home pay.”
Sepultures
Turkey’s raids, substantially targeting positions held by Kurdish forces in northern and northeastern Syria, killed at least 35 people and wounded 70 others, according to the British-grounded monitoring group the Syrian overlook for Human Rights(SOHR).
Ankara said the targeted Kurdish bases were being used to launch “terrorist” attacks on Turkish soil.
On Monday, thousands of people gathered to bury 11 people who failed in Al-Malikiyah in Syria’s far northeast, including a intelligencer working for a Kurdish news agency, with the caskets draped in red-white-and-green Kurdish flags.
“We prompt the world, all those who watch about mortal rights and the great powers” to press Turkey to stop its strikes that “target us with aeroplanes
and drones”, a mourner named Shaaban, 58, said during the sepultures.
In Berlin, the German foreign ministry prompted Turkey to “reply proportionally and to admire transnational law”, adding that “civilians at all times must be defended”.
SOHR said Kurdish fighters and Syrian dogfaces bore the mass of the casualties during the attacks in the areas of Raka and Hassake in the northeast and Aleppo in the north.
The Kurdish- led Syrian Popular Forces(SDF), among those attacked, said Turkey launched new air strikes on Monday.
The strikes also targeted PKK bases in mountainous northern Iraq and bases of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units(YPG) in Syria, the Turkish defence ministry said.
The PKK has waged a bloody insurrection for decades and is designated a terror group by Ankara and its Western abettors .
‘70 aeroplanes and drones’
Ankara considers the YPG to be a PKK-combined terror group. Erdogan said “70 aeroplanes and drones” that “entered 140 kilometres into northern Iraq and 20 kilometres into northern Syria” carried out the the weekend strikes.
An SDF prophet said that Turkish aeroplanes launched fresh strikes on Monday near Kobani. The SOHR verified the strikes. The SDF said a governance forces’ position was hit.
On Monday, there was ordnance exchange between Turkish forces backed by Syrian delegates and the SDF, according to a pressman.
