Syrian Kurds plan big attack to seal Turkish border: source

[MikeWB]

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The powerful Syrian Kurdish YPG militia and its local allies have drawn up plans for a major attack to seize the final stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border held by Islamic State fighters, a YPG source familiar with the plan said on Thursday.

Such an offensive could deprive Islamic State fighters of a logistical route that has been used by the group to bring in supplies and foreign recruits.

But it could lead to confrontation with Turkey, which is fighting against its own Kurdish insurgents and sees the Syrian Kurds as an enemy.

After a year of military gains aided by U.S.-led air strikes, the Kurds and their allies already control the entire length of Syria's northeastern Turkish frontier from Iraq to the banks of the Euphrates river, which crosses the border west of the town of Kobani.

Other Syrian insurgent groups control the frontier further west, leaving only around 100 km (60 miles) of border in the hands of Islamic State fighters, running from the town of Jarablus on the bank of the Euphrates west to near the town of Azaz.

But Turkey says it will not allow the Syrian Kurds to move west of the Euphrates.

The source confirmed a report on Kurdish news website Xeber24 which cited a senior YPG leader saying the plan includes crossing the Euphrates to attack the Islamic State-held towns of Jarablus and Manbij, in addition to Azaz, which is held by other insurgent groups.

The source did not give a planned date, but said a Jan. 29 date mentioned in the Xeber24 report might not be accurate.

The YPG has been the most important partner on the ground of a U.S.-led air campaign against Islamic State, and is a major component of an alliance formed last year called the Syria Democratic Forces, which also includes Arab and other armed groups. The alliance is quietly backed by Washington, even as its NATO ally in the region, Turkey, is hostile.

The political party affiliated with the YPG, the PYD, has been excluded from Syria peace talks the United Nations plans to hold in Geneva on Friday. The PYD and its allies say their exclusion undermines the process and have blamed Turkey.

Ankara fears further expansion by the YPG will fuel separatist sentiment among its own Kurdish minority. It views the Syrian Kurdish PYD as a terrorist group because of its affiliation to Turkish Kurdish militants.

The United States and Turkey have for months been discussing a joint military plan to drive Islamic State from the border, but there has been little sign of it on the ground.

The border area is being fought over by several sides in the complex, multi-sided civil war that has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.

At the western end of the Islamic State-held stretch of frontier, Syrian insurgents backed by Turkey have been fighting Islamic State near Azaz in a to-and-fro battle that has not yielded major shifts, said Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory Human Rights.

Tensions between the YPG and its allies on one hand and other insurgent groups backed by Turkey on the other have spilled into conflict near Azaz in the last three months.

Separately, the Syrian army and allied militia, supported by Russian air strikes, are meanwhile edging closer to the Islamic State-held town of al-Bab, some 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Manbij in the Aleppo area.

[MikeWB]

WSJ: Russian Intervention Emboldens Syrian Kurds
Moscow's operations allows fighters to ignore U.S. concerns and gain ground against other rebel groups

ISTANBUL—Russia's entry into the Syrian war and its subsequent conflict with Turkey have been a boon for one other combatant in addition to the Assad regime: the Syrian Kurds.
That is the same Syrian Kurdish forces that—after Washington's failure to bolster "moderate" Arab rebels—have also become America's indispensable local partner in the campaign against Islamic State.
That partnership with the U.S. remains vital for Syrian Kurdish forces. Yet, recent Russian operations have given them leeway to disregard American objections and gain new ground in controversial areas, including against other rebel groups.
"America and Russia both support the Kurds. In a way, the Kurds may be the only power in Syria on which both superpowers agree," said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Kurdish political analyst who focuses on Syria.
The question now is to what extent the Syrian Kurds can pursue their rekindled romance with Moscow without endangering Washington's backing—and without triggering a military intervention by their longtime nemesis, Turkey.
Known as YPG, the main Syrian Kurdish force is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a group that after the July collapse of its cease-fire with the Turkish government has pursued an armed struggle for a Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey. YPG units in Syria are full of PKK cadres and supporters originally from Turkey.
While Washington is careful to maintain a distinction between the YPG (which it backs) and the PKK (which it considers a terrorist organization), Ankara doesn't differentiate between the two groups. In Turkey's view, both are equally dangerous—and possibly even more dangerous than Islamic State.
YPG fighters, however, have been remarkably successful in ousting Islamic State from key terrain in northeastern Syria over the past year, in part thanks to U.S. air support.
These victories contrast with the incapacity of Turkish-backed Sunni Arab groups to make much headway against the extremist organization—and with Turkey's inability to control its own border with Islamic State-held parts of Syria.
"Kurds on the ground have become valuable to the U.S. and the U.S. military to the extent that the U.S. military now sees the Kurds as more reliable than the Turks," said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Before this budding relationship with Washington, the leftist PKK and other Kurdish factions enjoyed decades of close ties with Moscow—a connection that waned with the end of the Cold War.
The November downing of a Russian bomber jet by the Turkish air force in the vicinity of the Syrian-Turkish frontier plunged Moscow's ties with Ankara into a crisis—and suddenly made the Kurds useful again, Russian analysts say.
"Historically, Russia has had very good relations with the Kurds, but, until the incident with the Russian bomber, it was acting very carefully as far as Turkey was concerned," said Yelena Suponina, a Middle East expert at Russia's Institute of Strategic Studies, a state-run think tank. "Russia will act with greater boldness now, but it will remain careful. I don't think it will go as far as supplying weapons, but there would likely be some coordination, some exchange of tactical information."
The degree of military coordination between the Syrian Kurds and Moscow would depend on the extent to which the two sides see eye to eye on how to shape Syria's political future, added Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow. (Unlike other Syrian rebels, the Kurds have maintained de facto neutrality toward the Assad regime.)
Already, Russian airstrikes against Turkish-backed Syrian rebel groups in the past month have enabled an advance by Kurdish forces in the western enclave of Afrin, a move that threatens to choke off the main supply route between Turkey and the rebel-held parts of Aleppo.
The Kurds' avowed aim is to link up Afrin with their areas in northeast Syria by seizing most of the land along the Syrian-Turkish border—something that Ankara has repeatedly said it would not permit.
YPG officials have denied that they collaborate on the Afrin operations with Russia.
"There is no coordination," said Mr. Civiroglu, who is close to the Syrian Kurdish leadership. "However, what we have seen is that in the north of Aleppo the Russian airstrikes have helped YPG and the Kurds in general."
Meanwhile, Russia's deployment of the S-400 antiaircraft system in Syria after the downing of its jet has kept Turkish planes out of Syrian airspace. This, in turn, has allowed YPG to ignore another Turkish "red line"—Ankara's warning against the Kurds seizing territory from Islamic State on the western bank of the Euphrates.
In recent weeks, YPG units and their Arab allies crossed the river at the Tishrin dam and established a foothold in an area that is outside the range of Turkish border artillery—and that, thanks to the Russians, is no longer vulnerable to the Turkish air force.
While the U.S. initially indicated that it accepted the Turkish "red line," preferring Arab rebel forces to oust Islamic State from those areas west of the Euphrates, in December the U.S. military ended up carrying out intensive airstrikes that supported the Kurdish offensive there.
"The U.S. is not doing well in the fight against ISIS, and it increasingly has to rely on the Kurds as its primary partner in Syria," said Andrew Tabler, Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "So now it seems that the Kurds can play Russia and America off against each other."

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