Turkey has asked Washington to hand over its bases in Syria as the Trump administration appeared to reverse plans to withdraw from the country’s north-east on Tuesday, jeopardising Ankara’s plans to launch a widespread military operation targeting Kurdish groups.

The fresh row between the two Nato allies broke out as the US national security adviser, John Bolton, visited Ankara to row back on a surprise announcement by Donald Trump in December that US forces would leave Syria imminently, abandoning Kurdish proxies who had led its ground war against the Islamic State terror group. Turkey views those same Kurdish groups as mortal foes.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a scathing speech to parliament delivered while Bolton was still in the Turkish capital, said the US envoy had “made a serious mistake” and that Turkey would never agree to a compromise that protected the Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, whose members helped a US-led coalition push Isis out of most of Syria’s east.

“Elements of the US administration are saying different things,” said Erdoğan. “The YPG and the PKK can never be representatives of the Kurdish people.”

Erdoğan, signalling the rift, refused to meet Bolton, leaving the US national security adviser to instead hold talks with his Turkish counterpart, Ibrahim Kalin, and other officials at Ankara’s presidency complex.

The Turkish leader said Turkey’s armed forces had finished preparations to enter Syria and that Washington was stalling on a commitment to leave the town of Manbij as a first step.

Bolton, before arriving in Ankara, had directly contradicted the US president, claiming Washington would not leave Syria without first receiving guarantees that Turkey would not attack its allies.

Trump later claimed this was “no different from my original statements”, but said the US would leave “at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!”

Bolton’s added condition came amid a furore over Trump’s claims that Isis had been defeated and his apparent disregard for the fate of Kurdish forces recruited for the cause, whom Ankara had never accepted as legitimate allies.

Erdoğan on Tuesday repeated his insistence that there was no distinction between the YPG in Syria and the PKK in Turkey, with whom Ankara has fought a four-decade civil war.

Throughout the Syrian war, and in particular since the US partnered with the Kurds in 2014, Turkey has been deeply wary of Kurdish postwar ambitions, and what they might mean for the 500-mile border it shares with its southern neighbour.

An emboldened Kurdish cause has been a nightmare scenario for Turkish officials, whose crackdown on the Kurds inside Syria intensified 11 months ago, when the country’s military invaded an enclave in Syria’s north-west, ousting the YPG from the town of Afrin.

A schism between Turkey and the US over the fate of north-eastern Syria had grown since the Afrin operation, which also sparked tensions between Washington and its Kurdish-led anti-Isis force, which had implored its sponsor to defend it from the Turkish incursion.

Since then, the Isis fight has slowed and there have been fears that it might stop altogether, just as the terror group faces a military defeat in the last slithers of lands it holds along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Regional security officials say as many as 5,000 diehard Isis members remain in the area, with potentially more having abandoned their weapons and filtered back into towns and villages on both sides of the border, where they have been biding their time. The group has retained significant firepower; on Saturday, Isis members fired a guided missile at a Kurdish position, seriously wounding two British special forces members who were assisting the local fighters.

Britain and France, with growing uncertainty over US plans, had stepped up engagement with Kurdish forces with whom they too have partnered against Isis in Syria’s eastern deserts over the past four years.

Bolton was on Tuesday joined in the region by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, whose arrival appeared to be part of a rearguard to assure the Kurds and other allies that the US was not abandoning its stated strategies of defeating Isis and curbing Iranian influence. Both Bolton and Pompeo are Iran hawks and their oft-stated goals had been thrown into confusion after Trump’s December announcement.

Pompeo, on route to the region, said: “The counter-Isis campaign continues, the effort – the counter-Iran campaign absolutely continues, and our commitment to support Middle East stability is still full throttle.”