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ANKARA: The US has told Turkey it will not provide any more weapons to the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), Turkish state media said on Saturday, as Turkey’s offensive against the US-backed YPG in Syria entered its eighth day.
The Turkish incursion in northwest Syria’s Afrin region against the YPG has opened a new front in the multi-sided Syrian civil war, but has also further strained ties with NATO ally Washington.
Washington has angered Ankara by providing arms, training and air support to the Syrian Kurdish forces. Turkey sees the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a deadly insurgency in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast for three decades.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said on Saturday that Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for President Tayyip Erdogan, and US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster held a phone call on Friday in which McMaster confirmed the US would no longer provide weapons to the YPG.
On Thursday, the Pentagon said it carefully tracked weapons provided to the YPG and would continue discussions with Turkey, after Ankara urged Washington to end its support for the YPG or risk confronting Turkish forces on the ground in Syria.
On Friday, Erdogan said Turkish forces would sweep Kurdish fighters from the Syrian border and could push all the way east to the frontier with Iraq — a move which risks a possible confrontation with US forces allied to the Kurds.
Since the start of the incursion, dubbed “Operation Olive Branch” by Ankara, Erdogan has said Turkish forces would push east toward the town of Manbij, part of Kurdish-held territory some 100 km east of Afrin, where US troops were deployed to deter Turkish and US-backed fighters from clashing.
Any Turkish advance toward Manbij could threaten US efforts to stabilize northern Syria, where the US has about 2,000 troops, officially as part of the international coalition against Daesh.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday that the US needs to withdraw from the Manbij region immediately.
Cavusoglu told reporters that Turkey wanted to see concrete steps by the US to end its support for the YPG.
In a sign of growing bilateral tensions, Ankara and Washington disagreed over the main message of a phone call between Erdogan and US President Donald Trump held on Wednesday.
The White House said Trump had urged Erdogan to curtail the military operation in Syria, while Turkey said Erdogan had told Trump that US troops should withdraw from Manbij.
Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said she had seen media reports about the phone call, but was not aware of any change in US posture.
Anadolu said Kalin and McMaster had agreed for Turkey and the US to remain in close coordination to “avoid misunderstandings.”
Separately, hundreds of Kurds took to the streets of Cologne on Saturday in protest over Turkey’s offensive in northern Syria, as German officials warned against tensions between the country’s huge Kurdish and Turkish communities.
“Freedom for Kurdistan” and “Shame on you, Europe!” read some of the protesters’ placards in the western German city.
As the protest got underway, police put the number of demonstrators at 1,000, while an AFP journalist put the figure at several thousand.
Germany is home to some one million Kurds and three million people of Turkish origin.
Scuffles have erupted between members of the two communities since Turkey launched the Olive Branch operation, with several Turkish mosques in Germany hit by acts of vandalism.
According to Cologne police chief Uwe Jacob, the “risks of conflict (at the protest) were considerable.”
“Turkey has launched a war of aggression that breaches international law,” Kurdish community co-leader Mehmet Tanriverdi told regional newspaper Heilbronner Stimme Saturday.
The protest was organized by NAV-DEM, a Kurdish association deemed close to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is blacklisted by Ankara and its Western allies as a terror group.
In a separate development, several thousand Turkish Cypriots marched on Friday against what they said is Turkey’s unwanted influence that has emboldened hard-right groups to try and silence opposing views.
Protesters representing about 20 left-wing groups braved pouring rain to voice their opposition to Turkey’s agitation of “fascist” and “extremist” segments of their society.
The march in the breakaway, Turkish Cypriot half of the ethnically divided island nation’s capital came four days after an attack against the offices of left-wing newspaper Afrika by supporters of Turkey’s president over its criticism of Ankara’s military offensive in northern Syria.
Afrika Editor-in-Chief Sener Levent accused Erdogan of inciting supporters to vandalize the paper’s offices for saying the offensive was Ankara’s attempt to occupy Syrian territory.
Afrika earlier ran a headline that likened Turkey’s action to its military “occupation” of Cyprus’ breakaway Turkish Cypriot north, where Turkey has kept 35,000 troops since 1974 when it invaded following a coup by supporters of union with Greece.
Erdogan called Afrika “a cheap and nasty newspaper” that ran an “impertinent” headline and invited supporters to “give the necessary response to this.”
Levent said he was happy to see so many people standing up for free speech.
“It is these people who are against Erdogan ... we will never accept this harsh regime brought over from Turkey,” he said.
“No one will be able to stop this paper from saying what’s right.”
Several Greek Cypriots also joined in the march. Demonstrator Aydin Mehmet Ali said Cypriots need to create a united front against “fascistic and dictatorial actions from inside and outside” the country.