Turkey won’t take custody of Islamic State fighters in northeastern Syria, an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said amid the assault on the Syrian Kurdish militias who have detained the militants.

“Let me make one thing clear: Nobody is dumping those terrorists on Turkey,” Fahrettin Altun, a spokesman for Erdoğan, told local media.

The United States and European powers have condemned Turkey’s offensive over the last week, in part due to fears that the attack will lead to the release of ISIS fighters in the short term and ultimately a resurgence of the terrorist group. But Turkish officials maintain that the burden of guarding the prisoners lies with other countries, although Erdoğan says that he will target ISIS fighters within the area that Turkish forces invade.

“Turkey has from the beginning stated its readiness to take over the responsibility for [ISIS] members that remain within the area of the operation,” the Turkish leader said Wednesday.

His spokesman added, “If there are [ISIS] terrorists where we are operating currently, it’s not like we will let them walk."

Those pledges overstate Turkey’s ability to manage the threat of ISIS, even within the area that they take from the Kurds, according to U.S.-based analysts. The Turkish offensive is creating a “gap” in security that ISIS can exploit for as long as Turkey and the Syrian Kurdish militias, known as the YPG or the SDF, are fighting each other.

“The ISIS fight is not going to be their priority,” John Dunford, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner. “That gap will exist and it will exist in other areas as the U.S. prepares its forces to withdraw.”

Turkish officials, saying they plan at the moment only to attack the Syrian Kurdish militias within roughly 18 miles of the Turkish border with Syria, denied any responsibility for the ISIS fighters detained elsewhere in the region.

“What happens to terrorists outside the safe zone, however, is not a question that we need to deal with today,” said Altun.

But Turkey plans to go beyond the safe zone that Altun described, U.S. officials say. “We believe that the Turks now intend to go further south than originally expected and to go both west and east,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday.

That leaves Erdoğan effectively demanding that the Syrian Kurdish militias who are not under attack from Turkish forces continue to guard the prisoners.

“What Erdoğan is missing here is, the more the fighting between Turkey and the SDF continues, the more there is chaos, even if it's limited to the 30 kilometer safe zone, it will draw forces from the detention centers in the south,” Aykan Erdemir, a former Turkish lawmaker at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “This inevitably makes these detention centers more prone to the risk of mass escapes.”

That problem will likely be a high priority for Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading a delegation to Turkey to try to broker a ceasefire in the conflict. But Erdoğan, pledging to continue the assault for as long as he deems necessary, insists that the U.S.-led coalition remains responsible for the detained fighters. “It doesn't appear that anyone has a solution to address that gap,” Dunford said.