Turkey launched air strikes in Syria and Iraq overnight targeting Kurdish militants in attacks that risk escalating tensions in the volatile region.
Turkish fighter jets pounded bases belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) and its Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), across Turkey’s borders, the defence ministry said in a statement.
The air strikes came a week after Turkey blamed the PKK for a bomb attack in Istanbul that killed six people, and the statement cited Ankara’s right to self-defence in carrying out the assault.
A tweet from the ministry said the air operation had been “successfully completed”.
The PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organisation in Europe and the US, denied it was behind the Istanbul bombing. The group has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu wrote on Twitter that “it’s reckoning time” after the military began its operation late on Saturday.
Turkey regularly conducts air and small-scale land operations in northern Iraq, where the PKK is based. The army has also staged three full-scale incursions into Syria since 2016 to fight the YPG, which Ankara considers an extension of the PKK.
As a result, Turkey controls several thousand square kilometres inside the Arab state where it backs remnants of Syrian rebels who have been fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria’s decade-long civil war.
It is unclear if Turkey would carry out further strikes or conduct a land incursion in retaliation for the bomb attack. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly threatened a fresh offensive this year to push back the Kurdish militants from the border.
Another large-scale military operation in Syria could rally support for Erdoğan’s government among Turkish nationalists ahead of elections scheduled for next year. But Erdoğan has apparently failed to secure a green light for another ground offensive from Russia and Iran, who support Assad.
The US, which arms and trains the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in its campaign against Isis, also opposes further Turkish military interventions in Syria.
Brett McGurk, the White House co-ordinator for the Middle East and north Africa, said after the Turkish air strikes that Washington wanted “to make sure that nothing is done to destabilise the very difficult situation in north-east Syria”.
“We want to try and maintain stability there and obviously we do want to make sure that the border with Turkey is secure,” McGurk told a security conference in Manama, Bahrain.
The US has about 800 troops in north-east Syria where they support the SDF in its fight against Isis.
Washington’s support for the SDF has been a long-running point of friction between the Nato allies. The Turkish interior minister called the US a “murderer” after the bombing in the heart of Istanbul last week.
Farhad Shami, an SDF spokesman, said on Twitter that the Turkish air strikes struck Kobani, a predominantly Kurdish border town controlled by the SDF, and villages hosting internally displaced people.
The SDF’s commander, Mazloum Abdi, warned that the Turkish operation “threatens the whole region” and in a Twitter post urged residents to remain at home.
The SDF controls about a fifth of Syria in the country’s north-east with an army estimated to include about 100,000 fighters.
