Turkey says it will build 30 km ‘safe zone’ inside Syria after reaching agreement with Trump
Turkey’s president announced his country had won US approval to establish a 30-kilometre “safe zone” in Syria along its border to keep groups it regards as terrorists away from its frontier, a plan that could put Ankara into armed conflict with America’s Kurdish partners.
"A safe zone that will be created in Syria by us alongside the Turkish border,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech before parliament, saying he had won American cooperation for the deal during a 14 January phone call with US President Donald Trump.
Mr Trump in a tweet on Sunday threatened to “devastate Turkey economically” if it struck Kurdish militias that had fought alongside US forces in the four-year battle against Isis in Syria, but also called vaguely for a 20-mile safe zone.
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The cities of Qamishli and Kobani and several other key population centres controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces lie within 20 miles of the Turkish border, and it remains unclear how the US or Turkey would convince them to vacate territories the group won from Isis and the Damascus regime of Bashar al-Assad and wants as part of their autonomous Kurdish homeland in Syria.
The US president’s tweets prompted angry responses from senior Turkish officials. But Mr Trump and Mr Erdogan were apparently chummy during a phone call the following day.
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“Some messages given from Mr Trump’s social media account have upset me and my friends,” Mr Erdogan said Tuesday.
“We immediately acted and we discussed those issues with him on the phone again last night. It was a quite positive conversation.”
The two leaders “exchanged views on the creation of a terror-free safe zone in northern Syria on the basis of Syria’s territorial integrity,” said a Turkish readout of the conversation provided to international journalists.
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