Three civilians have died this morning in the Turkish town of Karkamis due to the impact of five projectiles launched by the Kurdish guerrillas from the Syrian side of the border. According to the provincial governor, the rockets hit a group of houses, a vehicle and a secondary school, killing a child, a teacher and another civilian. There are also ten injured, two of them serious.
On Sunday night, another mortar attack by the YPG injured six policemen and two Turkish soldiers at the Kilis border post. The Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) thus responds to the raid by the Turkish Air Force on Saturday night against dozens of guerrilla targets, resulting in twenty-nine deaths, according to Kurdish sources, who allege that there would be Several civilians were among the dead, as well as militants and soldiers from the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The Turkish air raid, along hundreds of kilometers of the border, was presented in turn by the Ankara government as a retaliation for the attack two Sundays ago on Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, attributed to the PKK in Syria, although it was claimed by the PKK. denies.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been trying for months to get the go-ahead from Russia and Iran for a fourth intervention by Turkish troops in northern Syria, targeting Manbij and Tal Rifat. An increase in tension on this front, six months before the elections, could tear apart the tacit coalition between the Turkish nationalist opposition, on the one hand, and the Kurdish nationalists of the HDP, who passively support it, on the other.
Likewise, the MHP, an ultranationalist partner of the Turkish government with great prestige among the security forces, takes a dim view of the conciliatory gestures of Erdogan's AKP with the HDP, repeated throughout this month, and they cling to the Istanbul attack to return to his frontal rejection of the Kurdish demands.
It should be remembered that the YPG is the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a terrorist organization that has been at war with the second largest army in NATO for forty years. Despite this, the YPG is also the hard core of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by Washington, London or Paris.
Not surprisingly, the YPG was one of the forces involved in stopping and then eliminating the conquests of the Islamic State in Syria. Although the participation of Hezbollah, the Guardians of the Revolution and the armed forces of Russia and the United States, in addition to the Syrian Arab Army, which caused most of the casualties, was no less key in said defeat.
On his return flight from Doha, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the current operation, dubbed Sword Claw and for the moment exclusively airborne, could turn into a ground one at any time. However, this threat has been in the air for more than two years.
Erdogan has clarified that "seventy devices, including drones, against 89 terrorist targets, including shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels and ammunition depots, up to 140 kilometers inside Iraq and 20 kilometers inside Syria" have participated in the mission.
The World Cup appointment, by the way, leaves an image that had been impossible for the last ten years: the photo of Erdogan shaking hands with his Egyptian counterpart Abdul Fatah al Sisi, with the Emir of Qatar as no less smiling mediator. . General Al Sisi, hammer of the Muslim Brotherhood, had not set foot in the emirate since his 2013 coup.
