Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photo: AFP
DAMASCUS,— Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday said the regime would support Kurdish fighters in Syrian Kurdistan, the northeast of the war-torn country, against Turkish soldiers and their Syrian Islamist proxies.
“We are prepared to support any group carrying out popular resistance against the Turkish aggression,” he said in a video shared by the presidency.
“This is not a political decision… We are not taking any political decisions now,” he told government troops on the frontline in the province of Idlib.
“It is a constitutional duty and a national duty,” he said.
Turkey and its Syrian proxies on October 9, 2019 launched a cross-border attack against Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria after an announced US military pullout.
Turkey wants to set up a buffer zone in Syrian soil along the length of its southern frontier to keep Kurdish forces at bay.
Under a US-brokered truce deal announced last week, the Kurds have until late Tuesday to pull out their fighters from a 120-kilometre (70-mile) long strip along the frontier that it has largely overrun during the operation.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been a key ally of the United States in the battle against Islamic State group in Syria.
The US pullout has largely been seen as a betrayal of Syria’s Kurds, who have spent most of the country’s civil war working towards autonomy.
Damascus has previously accused Kurds of treason over their alliance with Washington.
The Turkish attack forced the Kurds to seek aid from the regime and make a deal to deploy Assad’s forces in some northeastern Kurdish areas for the first time in years.
The regime has since deployed in the border town of Kobane as well as the town of Manbij further south, without clashing with Turkish forces.
Assad has repeatedly said he would eventually restore government control over all parts of Syria, driving out rebels and jihadists.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of local and foreign fighters suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s eight-year war.
In 2013, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
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