(Bloomberg) -- Bracing for a likely Turkish offensive, Kurdish fighters in northern Syria signaled they'll prioritize defending their “own people,” as concerns grow that the battle against Islamic State will be downgraded.
“The Syrian Democratic Forces are faced with two options: we fight Daesh and eradicate it,” said Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led SDF, using an acronym for the jihadist group. Or we defend “our people and defend our borders,” he said.
A Turkish operation to push the U.S.-backed Kurds further from Turkey's border appears imminent after President Donald Trump said American soldiers would stand aside from any operation in a major shift in Washington's foreign policy.
Bali also warned that prisons and refugee camps housing captured Islamic State members and their relatives are “ticking time bombs.”
“We don't know when they will explode against us and the world,” he said.
Describing the threatened Turkish intervention as an act of “racial cleansing,” Bali said Trump's U-turn had come as a surprise. Kurdish forces had already withdrawn seven kilometers from the frontier with Turkey under a security agreement forged between Ankara and Washington, he said.
Turkey sees the Kurds as a threat due to their links to the separatist PKK that has fought Turkish forces for decades.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dana Khraiche in Beirut at dkhraiche@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Mark Williams, Benjamin Harvey
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