Erdogan Weighs Risking Trump’s Anger to Enter Key Kurdish Town

(Bloomberg) -- Having secured back-to-back deals with the U.S. and Russia, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is pondering what to do if Kurdish forces don’t leave the Syrian border town of Kobani.

After Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on an accord to remove Kurdish forces abandoned by the U.S. from a buffer zone along the Turkish-Syrian border, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that “Kurdish units will remain face to face with the Turkish armed forces” if they don’t comply. Syrian “border guards and our military police will not stand between them,” he said.

Erdogan told state broadcaster TRT television late Thursday that Russia has given its consent for Turkish operations if it can’t convince Kurdish YPG forces to withdraw at least 30 kilometers away from the border by early next week. However, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Turkey Friday with fresh “large scale sanctions” if its military goes beyond the agreed operations area between the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.

The U.S. is particularly concerned about Kobani, a key town also known as Ayn al-Arab, which is within the border zone that Turkey agreed on with Russia, but outside an earlier one that it negotiated with Washington. Kurdish militias in Kobani won a hard-fought victory against Islamic State during the Obama administration, in what was seen as a turning point in the U.S. effort to destroy the terrorist group’s “caliphate.”

“The U.S. says ‘don’t go’ into Ayn al-Arab and Russians say ‘go’,” Erdogan told TRT in an interview. “We will make our decision depending on developments.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara at shacaoglu@bloomberg.net;Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Onur Ant at oant@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, Mark Williams

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.