{"id":30702,"date":"2019-01-26T19:23:01","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T19:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30702"},"modified":"2019-01-26T19:23:01","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T19:23:01","slug":"damascus-condemns-turkish-presence-in-north-as-breach-of-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=30702","title":{"rendered":"Damascus condemns Turkish presence in north as breach of deal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad<\/a>‘s government has condemned Turkey’s military presence in northern Syria<\/a> as a violation of a 1998 protocol between the two countries.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, the foreign ministry in Damascus accused Ankara of repeatedly breaching the Adana deal throughout Syria’s eight-year war<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Since 2011, the Turkish regime has violated and continues to violate this agreement,” a ministry source said, quoted by state news agency SANA.<\/p>\n

The source accused Turkey of “supporting terrorists”, using the government’s term for both Turkish-backed rebels and other armed groups including former al-Qaeda affiliate Hay’et Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).<\/p>\n

It said Ankara was breaching the deal through “occupying Syrian territory via terrorist organisations linked to it or directly via Turkish military forces”.<\/p>\n

But Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan<\/a> has insisted the Adana Protocol gives his country the right to deploy troops in the neighbouring country.<\/p>\n

Turkey backs Syrian rebel factions\u00a0who control part of the north and has observation posts across rebel-held Idlib province as part of a “de-escalation<\/a>”\u00a0agreement signed in 2017 with Assad’s ally Russia, and Iran.<\/p>\n

Ankara has threatened for months to launch a new offensive in northern Syria to drive out US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.<\/p>\n

It has twice led incursions into northern Syria<\/a> in 2016 and 2018. Since then, its forces and allied Syrian proxies have controlled a patch of territory on the border.<\/p>\n

Ankara has repeatedly threatened to march on areas further east, where the US-allied fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) are in control.<\/p>\n

The YPG is seen as an effective ground force by the US in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL<\/a>, also known as ISIS) armed group, but Turkey says it is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK<\/a>), which Ankara and Washington list as a terrorist group.<\/p>\n

Washington last month said<\/a> it would pull its 2,000 troops from the country, leaving the Kurds<\/a> scrambling to find a new ally in Damascus to avoid a potential Turkish assault.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Erdogan said Turkey expected a “security zone<\/a>” to be created in Syria in a few months.<\/p>\n

The Adana deal was signed in 1998 to end a crisis between the neighbours, sparked by the presence in Syria of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and bases run by the group.<\/p>\n

Turkey<\/a> argues the protocol provides Ankara with the legal ground to intervene in Syria against the PKK and its affiliates, because of the Syrian regime’s failure to act against the group.<\/p>\n

Damascus has regained control of almost two-thirds of the country after Russia<\/a> intervened militarily in 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has condemned Turkey’s military presence in northern Syria as a violation of a 1998 protocol between the two countries. On Saturday, the foreign ministry in Damascus accused Ankara of repeatedly breaching the Adana deal throughout Syria’s eight-year war. “Since 2011, the Turkish regime has violated and continues to violate this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":30703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}