THE RUNDOWN | Turkey is reportedly preparing an offensive right on the Syrian border to attack Kurdish YPG forces. For decades, Turkey has accused said forces of being terror groups cooperating with the Kurdish PKK terror group in Turkey. TRT World's Ali Mustafa and our Dan Raviv analyze.
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A faction of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army announced the 'start' of an operation against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia.
Despite the group's declaration, there has not yet been official confirmation of a larger Turkish offensive.
Turkey is vehemently opposed to a Kurdish entity on its border, fearing it will strengthen the separatist ambitions of the Kurdish minority inside the country, and says the YPG is a Syrian 'terrorist' offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The PKK, which has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1984, is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.
A withdrawal of US ground forces in Syria will give Turkey freer rein to target Washington's Kurdish partners in the fight against jihadists but analysts doubt Ankara's capacity to 'eradicate' the Islamic State extremist group.
Turkish officials have said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan heavily weighed in on the decision by his US counterpart Donald Trump to pull all 2,000 US troops from Syria.
Trump's shock order came after Erdogan convinced him that Turkey could eliminate the last remaining pockets of IS after the jihadists suffered a series of military defeats.
'We have the strength to neutralize (IS) by ourselves,' Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu insisted on Tuesday.
But Erdogan's main objective in Syria is actually to target the YPG, which the US has trained to spearhead the fight against IS.
Trump said on Sunday after a telephone conversation with Erdogan that he counted on him to "eradicate" IS which he said was now 'largely defeated'.
Turkey has repeatedly called on the US to stop training and providing armed weapons to the YPG in the fight against IS, claiming that Turkish military forces would be more effective in eliminating the jihadist threat.
The last pockets of IS are in fact in eastern and central Syria, hundreds of kilometers away from the northern areas of the country which the Turkish military and Syrian rebels are accustomed to and where they led two offensives in 2016 and 2018.
Idlib is Syria's last major rebel and jihadist stronghold in the country's north.
Turkey was hit by a series of terror attacks blamed on Kurdish group and IS in recent years including the last in January 2017 when a gunman killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub.
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