Turkey said it had begun a ground incursion into the Kurdish enclave in Syria known as Afrin a day after intense aerial bombardment that signalled the opening of hostilities in a new phase of Ankara’s involvement in the war across the border.



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The launch of the ground campaign by the Turkish military on Sunday, alongside Syrian rebel factions under Ankara’s tutelage, came on the second day of a military offensive called “Operation Olive Branch” by the Turkish government, with dozens of airstrikes hitting more than 150 targets in the Kurdish-dominated district from late on Saturday afternoon.

Kurdish militias shelled the Turkish province of Kilis across the border in response. One person was killed and 32 wounded after a missile from Syria struck the Turkish bordertown of Reyhanli.

A spokesman for the Kurdish militias that control the Afrin enclave said they had blocked the Turkish army-led initial attempt at a ground incursion on Sunday morning.



“The Turkish army and its Syrian agent factions have not entered one inch of Afrin district inside Syria,” the spokesman claimed.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, vowed on Sunday that the campaign would be over in a “short time” and warned Kurdish political activists in Turkey against staging protests.

“This is a national struggle,” he told a rally in Bursa. “We will crush anyone who opposes our national struggle.”

Turkey said it was launching the Afrin campaign to clear out the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and its political arm, the Democratic Union party (PYD), from the district. Ankara regards them as part of the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a designated terror group that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.



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Ankara has been angered by the YPG’s expansion in northern Syria and its alliance with the anti-Islamic State US-led coalition, which has backed and later armed the group as it spearheaded offensives against Isis in the region. The Afrin offensive came after a US announcement that it would train an army to patrol Syria’s borders that would include the YPG as a key component, which Turkey said was a national security threat.

Turkish officials on Sunday insisted the operation in Afrin was aimed at clearing out the Kurdish militias ruling the enclave, which they insisted had repeatedly harassed and targeted Turkish positions near the border.

Bekir Bozdag, the deputy prime minister and government spokesman, said in a briefing with reporters the campaign was “not against the Kurds” and that Ankara would defeat the YPG there and restore democratic institutions and infrastructure.



He repeated earlier claims that the local population had suffered oppression under the Kurdish militias and would welcome Turkey’s intervention and the Ankara-backed rebels participating in the campaign. “People there are asking Turkey to cleanse the region and save them as well,” he said.

There are an estimated 600,000 civilians in Afrin, and Turkey says there may be up to 10,000 YPG fighters.

Turkey intervened in the war in Syria in August 2016 to limit Kurdish expansion west of the Euphrates river and to drive Isis, which controlled key border towns, from the area as well. The Afrin offensive was launched after Ankara apparently obtained Russia’s blessing, dispatching its chief of intelligence and the army’s chief of staff to Moscow in recent days.

It takes place against a backdrop of deep-seated tensions with Washington and continuing military losses for the Turkey-backed opposition in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has inched closer to a military victory in the seven-year conflict, and peace talks brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran have gone nowhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man looks out of a window damaged by a rocket fired by Kurdish fighters in Syria into the town of Kilis, Turkey. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

The move has provoked fierce debate within Syria’s opposition, which has enjoyed broad Turkish backing for years. Some see it as a diversion from a campaign by the Syrian government against Idlib, the last province under rebel control, describing the Syrian rebel factions taking part in the offensive as mercenaries to Turkey’s will.

Others see the offensive as a necessary measure against the YPG, which they accuse of attempting to carve out a statelet in northern Syria, displacing local Arabs and which they believe to be secretly in league with the Assad regime.

Turkish officials have pledged to pursue a campaign with limited civilian casualties, but said they believed the Kurdish militias would use human shields to protect key installations.

“The Turkish army wants through these military operations to inspire fear among civilians to force them from their lands and lay the ground for occupying the city,” the YPG branch in Afrin said in a statement, adding that it held both Ankara and Moscow accountable for the “massacres that will be committed in Afrin”.