Syria calls on Kurds to join regime ranks

DAMASCUS - Syria's army and police Wednesday called on Kurdish fighters and security forces in northeast Syria to join their ranks following a Turkish cross-border incursion, state media said.

The appeal comes after regime troops deployed along parts of Syria's northeastern border in a deal with Kurdish authorities to help stave off the Turkish offensive, launched October 9. It is the largest Syrian army deployment in the area since 2012.

Meanwhile Syrian state media reported on Wednesday that Syrian army troops were engaged in heavy clashes with Turkish forces in the countryside around the border town of Ras al Ain.

It did not give details but Turkish-backed Syrian rebels said intermittent clashes have taken place in recent days with Syrian troops south of Ras al Ain, which they had seized from Syrian Kurdish-led forces.

On Tuesday, the Turkey-backed rebels said they had captured an undisclosed number of Syrian army soldiers near Tel Hawa, in the countryside around Ras al Ain. A spokesman for the rebels said that Kurdish fighters had not fully withdrawn from the border area and that a new round of clashes were expected.

A separate ceasefire agreement reached between Ankara and Damascus-backer Moscow last week provided for members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw from the border and solidified the presence of pro-government forces there.

"The general command of the armed forces is ready to welcome members of SDF units who are willing to join its ranks," said a Syrian defence ministry statement carried by state news agency SANA.

It said all Syrians, including the Kurdish minority, are confronting "one enemy".

Syria's interior ministry said it was willing to provide police services to residents of the northeast, calling on members of the Kurdish internal security services, known as Asayish, to join its ranks, SANA reported.

The Turkish military and its Syrian proxies attacked Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria in early October with the aim of creating a roughly 30-kilometre deep buffer zone along the frontier.

Joint patrols

Left in the lurch by a US troop withdrawal from the border area, Kurdish forces were left with little choice but to turn to the Syrian government for protection.

Damascus forces rushed north and are expected to deploy along much of the border zone, but a 10-kilometre-deep strip is set to be jointly patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops under their deal, beginning on Friday.

"We will start the joint work on the ground on Friday, namely we are starting the joint patrols," Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told parliament in a televised speech on Wednesday.

Under the agreement hammered out in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi last week after Turkey's cross-border offensive into Syria, Kurdish militia forces were given a 150-hour deadline, which expired at 1500 GMT Tuesday.

Under the Sochi deal, Turkish and Russian joint patrols were meant to begin after the deadline expired.

Erdogan said Russian authorities informed Ankara that some 34,000 members of the "terror group" have withdrawn - together with 3,260 pieces of heavy weaponry - from the earmarked buffer zone.

Erdogan told lawmakers from his AK Party that Turkey has information the Kurdish YPG militia has not completed its pull-out, despite the assurances from Russia that they had left ahead of the deal's deadline.

"Even though the information in our hands suggests this has not been succeeded in a full sense, we will give our response to them after our field assessments," he said, adding Turkey reserved the right to return to military operations against the YPG in the area.

Ankara views the YPG as a terrorist organisation because of its links to the PKK, a Kurdish militant group active in southeast Turkey which has waged a deadly insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.

The YPG is the main component in the SDF, which fought for years alongside US forces to shatter the declared "caliphate" of Islamic State (IS) terrorists that spanned a swathe of northern and eastern Syria.

Turkish-backed forces crossed the border into northeast Syria attack the YPG after President Donald Trump's abrupt withdrawal of US forces there a few days earlier was interpreted as a green light for the incursion.

Trump's decision has been condemned in Washington by Democrats and his fellow Republicans alike for abandoning the Kurdish fighters who helped rout IS. 

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted decisively to sanction Turkey, a NATO ally. The House voted 403-16 for a resolution calling on Trump to impose sanctions and other restrictions on Turkey and Turkish officials over its offensive in Syria.