Ignoring warnings from the U.S., Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered an incursion into Syria over the weekend, accusing the U.S. of overarming Kurdish forces and encouraging their separatist aspirations. Turkish troops and rebels from the Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army launched a three-pronged attack on the northwest town of Afrin to clear it of the Kurdish fighters. The Kurds led the U.S. campaign to rout Islamic State from Syria, but Turkey regards them as a terrorist menace with designs on its territory, according to Bloomberg.
The faceoff with the U.S. over Afrin exacerbates already considerable strains that have tested Turkey’s relations with Washington in recent years, including a Turkish banker’s conviction in the U.S. on sanctions violation charges, and U.S. resistance to extraditing a Turkish-born preacher whom Ankara accuses of instigating a failed 2016 coup.
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Cohen was expected to arrive in Turkey on Monday for talks, according to Turkey’s foreign ministry.
Turkey’s intervention in the Afrin area, and declared intention to expand the campaign to Manbij, where U.S. troops are based, also threatens to open a new front in the Syrian civil war as Russia tries to end it.
Costly Campaign
The Kurdish forces are reported to have reinforced Afrin and “the city is known to have a wide network of tunnels,” QNB Finansbank chief economist Gokce Celik said in an email on Monday. “In this context, ‘clearing Afrin’ could take an extended period of time and it might prove costly.”
“Although the operation seemed to be well-advertised, the news flow might prove unnerving for investors in the upcoming period, causing the underperformance of lira-denominated assets relative to peers,” Celik added.
The lira pared a decline against the dollar to 0.1 percent after sliding as much as 1.1 percent overnight. The yield on the nation’s five-year bond climbed 5 basis points to a one-month high of 12.78 percent.
The impact of the military operation on the economy will be “extremely limited,” Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said Monday, adding that the operation would be short and have a narrow scope.
The U.S. is “very concerned” about the situation in northwest Syria, especially the plight of innocent civilians who are now faced with an escalation in fighting, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Sunday in a statement, urging Turkey “to exercise restraint and ensure that its military operations remain limited in scope and duration and scrupulous to avoid civilian casualties.”
Turkey denied reports of civilian casualties.
The trigger for the offensive was a plan by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State to incorporate Kurdish fighters into a force that would guard Syria’s border with Turkey. The Turkish government is afraid the Kurds will use the force as cover to stage attacks on Turkey. It accuses the Kurds of operating hand-in-hand with the armed PKK group that’s long fought for autonomy in southeast Turkey and is branded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and European Union.