Mikhail Metzel / TASS
Moscow
Syrian and Russian forces will deploy in northeast Syria to remove Kurdish YPG fighters and their weapons from the border with Turkey under a deal agreed which both Moscow and Ankara hailed as a triumph.
The agreement expands on a U.S.-brokered truce which expired on Tuesday and underlines the dizzying changes in Syria since U.S. President Donald Trump announced a U.S. troop withdrawal two weeks ago ahead of Turkey’s cross-border offensive.
Six days later, Russian and Turkish forces will jointly start to patrol a narrower, 10 km strip of land in the “safe zone” that Ankara has long sought in northeast Syria.
After six hours of talks with Erdogan in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin expressed satisfaction at decisions he described as “very important, if not momentous, to resolve what is a pretty tense situation which has developed on the Syrian-Turkish border.”
A senior Turkish official described it as an “excellent” deal which would achieve Turkey’s long-held goal of a border strip cleared of the YPG, which Ankara regards as a terrorist organization because of its links to insurgents inside Turkey.
Last week’s U.S.-brokered deal, which technically expired at 1900 GMT on Tuesday, was limited the central part of the border strip between the Syrian towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, where Turkish forces had focused their military offensive.
Under the deal with Moscow, the length of border which the YPG would be required to pull back from is more than three times the size of the territory covered by the U.S.-Turkish accord, covering most of the area Turkey had wanted to include.
“The outcome of the Putin-Erdogan meeting in Sochi today indicates that Erdogan has become a master of leveraging the U.S. and Russia against each other to maximize Ankara’s gains,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute said in a tweet. “Turkey got the safe zone it wanted all this time.”
