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Turkey Hits Brake on Syria Foray After Deals With Russia, U.S.

Turkey Hits Brake on Syria Foray After Deals With Russia, U.S.

(Bloomberg) -- Russia and Turkey agreed to work together to take back large chunks of Syrian territory controlled by Kurdish forces once allied with the U.S., giving each country a bigger say in how postwar Syria will look.

After six hours of talks, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan struck a deal on Tuesday to clear the Kurdish fighters from a zone in northeastern Syria bordering Turkey. Ankara had launched a widely deplored offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia before a temporary truce negotiated with the U.S. last week paused fighting, taking control of a strip of Syrian land along its frontier.

Turkey Hits Brake on Syria Foray After Deals With Russia, U.S.

The agreement with Moscow, Assad’s ally in the war, gives Ankara greater assurance that the Kurdish forces it regards as a mortal enemy will be kept far from its frontier, and it has agreed to halt its foray beyond the area of Syrian land it now controls.

The Kurdish fighters, who are linked to separatist insurgents that Turkey has been battling since the mid-1980s, had taken over about a third of Syria in the course of its eight-year civil war.

They had won a major ally in the U.S. as the Pentagon’s vanguard force against Islamic State, but recently saw their fortunes change after President Donald Trump ordered the removal of most of the American troops that had served as a buffer between the Kurdish forces and the Turkish military.

That decision was harshly assailed by both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress, where Trump’s move was regarded as the betrayal of a valuable ally and bulwark against Islamic State.

After threatening to capture a 444-kilometer (276-mile) border strip, Erdogan first agreed with the U.S. to limit his army’s operations to an area 120 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep between the border towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. Then, in the talks in Sochi on Tuesday, he reached a deal with Putin to secure the rest of the frontier through joint patrols and coordinated action with Syrian forces to remove Kurdish fighters from the area within 150 hours from noon on Wednesday.

“At this stage, there is no further need to conduct a new operation outside the present operation area,” Turkey’s Defense Ministry said in a statement early Wednesday.

The agreement came hours before the expiration of the five-day truce the U.S. arranged between Turkey and the YPG.

“We’ve signed a historic memorandum with Putin for the territorial and political integrity of Syria and the return of refugees,” Erdogan said at a joint news conference with the Russian president. Putin said “crucial” decisions have been taken to help “resolve the rather acute situation that has developed on the Syrian-Turkish border.”

Turkey Hits Brake on Syria Foray After Deals With Russia, U.S.

Vice President Mike Pence’s office said in a statement that the leader of the Kurdish YPG militia sent him a letter confirming his forces met their obligations and “have withdrawn from the relevant area of operations.” Erdogan said after his meeting with Putin last night that the U.S. hadn’t kept all its promises on pushing the militants away from the border and that Turkey would target any remaining YPG members between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.

Trump, who was widely criticized as giving the green light to the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish fighters, tweeted that “good news seems to be happening with respect to Turkey, Syria and the Middle East!”

--With assistance from Abeer Abu Omar, Selcan Hacaoglu and Stepan Kravchenko.

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

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Mark Williams

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