Turkey warns ’hostile forces’ west of Euphrates

Turkey would not look positively on Syrian forces hostile to Ankara moving west of the Euphrates River, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said on Monday, after a US-backed alliance of Kurdish militia and Arab rebels captured a dam on the Euphrates from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Turkey has long opposed advances by Syrian Kurdish forces for fear this will lead to the creation of a Kurdish state on its border that might in turn encourage its own Kurdish minority.

Speaking at a news conference in the Serbian capital where he was on an official visit, Davutoğlu said the government's current information showed that the groups that crossed the Euphrates over the weekend were Arab rebels, not Kurdish militia forces.

After capturing the Tishrin Dam on Saturday from ISIL, the Kurdish militia force, the People's Protection Units (YPG), moved into territory west of the Euphrates amid ongoing clashes with ISIL.

A US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurds and Arab rebel groups, supported by US coalition planes, captured the dam located 90 kilometers east of Aleppo from ISIL on Saturday, cutting off one of the group's main supply routes across the Euphrates.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said the alliance has cleared the eastern side of the Euphrates and that clashes are now taking place in areas west of the river.
  todayszaman.com and Reuters
--
-
Related:

• Turkish military denies sending tanks to Syria

• Une coalition militaire arabo-kurde a pris samedi aux jihadistes de l'Etat Islamique (EI) un barrage stratégique de l'Euphrate, dans le nord de la Syrie, a annoncé le porte-parole du groupe...

• In a TV interview late on Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that Turkey had warned the PYD not to cross to the "west of the Euphrates and that we would hit it the moment it did. 

• No solution in Syria crisis without Turkey, says Davutoglu. "The PYD will not pass to the west of the Euphrates"