BICOM

Up to 24 civilians have been killed and an estimated 5,000 displaced in the first three days of Turkey’s offensive against a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria, the UN and monitors said on Tuesday.

Turkey launched its military campaign dubbed “Operation Olive Branch” into the northern Syrian enclave of Afrin on Saturday, aiming to force the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), out of Afrin. Turkey regards the YPG as part of the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a designated terror group by the US and EU that has fought a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the NGO that monitors the Syrian civil war, 24 civilians had died since Saturday, 22 in Turkish air and artillery strikes and two as a result of Kurdish fire. Turkey has denied killing civilians, saying it only targets combatants. Turkish officials on Tuesday confirmed two of its soldiers had been killed.

Twenty-five Syrian rebels fighting alongside Turkey have also reportedly been killed, along with 26 Kurdish fighters. “We will not leave the blood of our martyrs on the ground and will continue our struggle until we root out terror,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu tweeted.

The estimated 5,000 displaced people are heading towards government-held Aleppo, but checkpoints are preventing those fleeing from reaching relatives and friends in two Kurdish districts there. UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said: “We have been preparing for a large-scale response depending on the needs of the civilian population. We cannot stress enough the need for all parties involved to protect civilians, to protect civilian infrastructure, and to respect international law.”

Turkey’s objective is to first capture Afrin province and then seize control of Manbij, a city east of Aleppo that is also under Kurdish control. The city of Manbij is thought to be a red-line for the US, which would bring Turkish forces in close proximity to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Syrian militias that retook Raqqa from ISIS last year.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said he took “very seriously Turkey’s legitimate security concerns,” but urged it to “exercise restraint in the military action and the rhetoric”. “The violence in Afrin disrupts what was a relatively stable area of Syria. It distracts from international efforts to ensure the defeat of ISIS, and this could be exploited by ISIS and al-Qaeda.”

Maj. Gen. James Jarrard, commander of the US coalition’s special operations task force in Syria, said that the SDF “are still making daily progress and sacrifices, and together we are still finding, targeting and killing ISIS terrorists intent on keeping their extremist hold on the region. We cannot take our focus off our mission, and we must not lose our momentum in taking these terrorists off the battlefield and preventing them from resurfacing somewhere else.”