Turkish bombing of Kurds carries risk of instability

Turkey has also denied, and is now investigating, allegations that their tanks recently fired over the Syrian border and killed members of the Kurdish YPG (also known as the People’s Protection Units).

In July the U.S.-led coalition has conducted some of the most sustained raids in northern Syria against the militants since the campaign began almost a year ago.

A Turkish official said Turkey and the United States were discussing “the formation of a de-facto safe zone” which would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees from Turkey.

Ankara has been accused in the past of supplying arms to Isis to build it up as a counterweight to the YPG, which is allied to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) operating in Turkey and northern Iraq.

Kurdish forces within Syria, he added, remain “outside the scope of the current military effort”.

The zone’s proposed area would extend along a 68-mile stretch of the Turkish border and reach 40 miles into Syrian territory, west of the Euphrates River, and into the province of Aleppo, say Turkish officials.

It has no plans to send ground troops into Syria and the airstrikes there are meant to give support to moderate Syrian rebels fighting Islamic State, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted as saying by the Hurriyet newspaper.

The finger pointing over the shelling underscores how Turkey’s weekend policy shift to more directly confront Islamic State is adding an additional layer of complexity to the patchwork of alliances vying for influence along Turkey’s war- torn southern borderlands.

The Anadolu Agency said those detained in Ankara’s Haci Bayram neighbourhood include a number of foreign nationals.

Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party leader Selahattin Demirtas speaks to the media about Turkey’s airstrikes against Kurdish rebel bases in Iraq, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday.

The US and Turkey are working together on military plans to clear the Islamic State (IS) group from parts of northern Syria, American officials say. “The objective of the operation is to clear the border and close the border to Daesh“, the official said, using an Arabic slang term for the militant group. The U.S. has long rejected Turkish and other requests for a no-fly zone to halt Syrian government air raids, fearing it would draw U.S. forces further into the civil war.

Idriss Nassan, the deputy head of foreign affairs for Kurdish Kobani administration in Syria, confirmed the attacks in a phone interview on Monday, which he described as an attempt by Turkey to prevent “the progress of a self-governing Kurdish area”.

Turkey has mounted a two-pronged offensive targeting both the Islamic State group in Syria and PKK rebels in northern Iraq after a spate of violence including a suicide attack a week ago that killed 32 people and was blamed on IS.

“We do not want to see Daesh on Turkey’s borders”, he told Turkish TV.

On Friday night and in the early hours of Saturday, Turkish jets bombed PKK camps in northern Iraq for the first time in the last two-and-a-half years.

“Turkey will show the strongest reaction to the slightest movement that threatens it”, Davutoglu said. After the Islamic State group launched an attack within Turkey, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the opportunity to declared a “full-fledged battle against all terrorist organizations”.