Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during a defence industry meeting event in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. Erdogan said Turkey will begin "within a few days" a new military operation to drive out U.S-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters in Syria, east of the Euphrates River. The move is likely to increase tensions between NATO allies, Turkey, and the United States. (Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during a defence industry meeting event in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. Erdogan said Turkey will begin "within a few days" a new military operation to drive out U.S-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters in Syria, east of the Euphrates River. The move is likely to increase tensions between NATO allies, Turkey, and the United States. (Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)

BEIRUT (AP) — The main Syrian Kurdish-led militia warned on Thursday that threats by Turkey’s president to launch a new military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria will negatively impact their fight against the Islamic State group.

Nuri Mehmud, spokesman of the People’s Protection Units or the YPG, also said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s statement from the day before about a new operation “within a few days” is tantamount to a declaration of war. The YPG makes the backbone of the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

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Mehmud spoke as SDF fighters pushed deeper in the Hajin area, the last IS stronghold in Syria. He expressed hopes that the presence of troops from the U.S.-led coalition in northern and eastern Syria would deter Turkey from an offensive similar to the one Ankara launched earlier this year in the northern Syrian enclave of Afrin.

In recent months, Turkey has shelled Kurdish positions across the border in Syria, east of the Euphrates River, and has threatened to drive out the Syrian YPG.

The YPG is the main component of the SDF that rolled back IS from wide parts of Syria with the help of the U.S.-led coalition. Ankara views YPG fighters as terrorists because of their links to the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey. U.S. troops are deployed with the Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, in part to prevent clashes with Turkey.

Turkey’s state-run news agency reported that a convoy of Turkish military vehicles arrived at the border with Syria on Thursday. Anadolu Agency said the convoy, including armored personnel carriers, was deployed to the province of Hatay as reinforcents. The agency reported similar troop movement earlier this week.

Meanwhile, SDF fighters pushed deeper into the Syrian town of Hajin, taking its main market amid intense fighting with the extremists in their last holdout on Thursday.

The Kurdish-led Syrian fighters have been fighting to take Hajin and nearby villages in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour since Sept. 10. Over the past weeks, the offensive intensified with the arrival of reinforcements from northern Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS defenses “collapsed” in Hajin as the town’s main market was captured. The Observatory said SDF fighters were also able to evacuate some 600 civilians, many of them women and children, out of IS-held areas.

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Europe-based Omar Abu Layla, of the activist-run DeirEzzor 24 monitoring group, confirmed the market was taken as well as the main mosque in Hajin.

“The end of the (IS) organization in Hajin is very near,” he said.

Also Thursday, UNICEF said two babies died in the refugee settlement of Rukban on the Syrian border with Jordan, where tens of thousands of people have been living amid shortage of food and medicine.

Last month, the U.N. and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent organized a desperately needed aid delivery to Rukban, the first since January.

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Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.