Apr 30, 2019

The US administration’s top Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey will hold talks with Turkish officials in Ankara tomorrow to discuss what the State Department called in a statement Turkey’s “legitimate security concerns,” which is shorthand for Ankara’s worries about the presence of US-backed Kurdish militants along its border.

Sources familiar with Jeffrey’s efforts to broker a deal between Turkey and the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) for a proposed safe zone aired skepticism that the US diplomat would mark much progress before heading to Geneva for meetings with the Syrian Small Group that includes officials from Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, all potential contributors, or so Washington hopes, to a proposed safe zone in northern Syria.

Jeffrey’s demands — first reported by Al-Monitor — for the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to let a limited number of Turkish forces into Syria to police the proposed zone were firmly rejected by SDF commander Mazlum Kobane when the pair met in Syria two weeks ago. Kobane reportedly told the US diplomat that he would only consider the idea if Turkish forces pulled out of the mainly Kurdish enclave of Afrin, which they have occupied since March 2018.

Ankara is highly unlikely to pull out of Afrin because the YPG tells it to and Kobane would know that — least of all as the YPG-linked Afrin Liberation Forces steps up its insurgency against the Turkish military and their Free Syrian Army allies there.

Turkey’s Defense Ministry confirmed that one Turkish soldier was killed and three others wounded yesterday in the region during an attack it blamed on the YPG, but offered no further details.