Syria ceasefire to allow Kurds exit
WORLD: US vice president Mike Pence has announced that the US and Turkey have agreed to a five-day ceasefire in northern Syria. The ceasefire will allow for a Kurdish withdrawal from a security zone .
Mr Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey’s invasion of Syria.
US VICE president Mike Pence has announced that the US and Turkey have agreed to a five-day ceasefire in northern Syria.
The breakthrough will allow for a Kurdish withdrawal from a security zone some 20 miles south of the Turkish border.
After more than four hours of negotiations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr Pence said the purpose of his high-level mission was to end the bloodshed caused by Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and remained silent on whether the agreement amounted to another abandonment of the US’s former Kurdish allies in the fight against the socalled Islamic State.
Turkish troops and Turkishbacked Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after President Donald Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the US from the area.
Mr Pence and US secretary of state Mike Pompeo lauded the deal as a significant achievement, and Mr Trump tweeted that it was “a great day for civilisation”.
But the agreement essentially gives the Turks what they had sought to achieve with their military operation in the first place. After the Kurdish forces are cleared from the safe zone, Turkey has committed to a permanent ceasefire but is under no obligation to withdraw its troops.
In addition, the deal gives Turkey relief from sanctions the administration had imposed and threatened to impose since the invasion began, meaning there will be no penalty for the operation.
Kurdish forces were not party to the agreement, and it was not immediately clear whether they would comply.
Before the talks, the Kurds indicated they would object to any agreement along the lines of what was announced by Mr Pence. But Mr Pence maintained that the US had obtained “repeated assurances from them that they’ll be moving out”.
Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the US and European Union, designate as a terrorist organisation.
Mr Pence and Mr Erdogan wore dour expressions as they shook hands before a nearly 90-minute one-on-one meeting, and during an expanded bilateral meeting with the full delegations.
US President Donald Trump suggested on Wednesday that a Kurdish group was a greater terror threat than the Islamic State group, and he welcomed the efforts of Russia and the Assad government to fill the void left after he ordered the removal of nearly all US troops from Syria amid a Turkish assault on the Kurds.
“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” Mr Trump said.
“They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”
He added: “Let them fight their own wars.”
Severe condemnation of Mr Trump’s failure to deter Turkey’s assault on the Kurds sparked bipartisan outrage in the US and calls for swift punishment for the Nato ally.
Republicans and Democrats in the House, bitterly divided over the Trump impeachment inquiry, banded together for an overwhelming 354-60 denunciation of the US troop withdrawal.
They’ve got a lot of sand over there that they can play with. US President Donald Trump speaking about the situation in northern Syria.