Turkey ramps up assault on Kurdish enclave in Syria

Turkey is turning up the heat on Syria’s Afrin, launching deadly strikes on Damascus loyalists deployed around the Kurdish enclave and closing in on its main city.

The development, which could redraw the map of northern Syria, comes as Russian-backed regime forces pounded shrinking rebel pockets in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus.

The violence in both enclaves came as the foreign ministers of Turkey and Russia, the two major foreign players in a conflict entering its eighth year tomorrow, met in Moscow.

A Turkish presidency source said Afrin’s encirclement “will have been completed by the evening,” retracting an earlier statement by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan predicting its fall last night.

Afrin city lies in the heart of a Kurdish-majority enclave in northern Syria which neighbouring Turkey sees as a threat and against which it launched a deadly ground and air offensive on January 20.

Before the retraction, Erdogan had told supporters in Ankara Wednesday he hoped “Afrin will, God willing, have completely fallen by the evening.”

— AFP