Turkey's top security council urges mission in Kurdish Afrin

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) - Turkey’s National Security Council on Tuesday demanded an army operation in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin northwestern Syria as it said forces present there posed a threat.

Convening under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in capital Ankara the council wanted the inclusion of Afrin in a tripartite deal between Ankara, Tehran, and Moscow that authorized the deployment of three countries' militaries in Syrian zones of conflict.

The isolated Afrin has, for the most of the Syrian civil war, remained largely safe and outside the of the reach of ravaging effects of the war as the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) consolidated its power there.

The Russian-Iranian-Turkey agreement signed last August in Kazakhstan’s Astana particularly designates the Province of Idlib as a zone of de-escalation where Ankara-backed Islamist rebels affiliated with al-Qaeda hold sway and clash with the Syrian army.

"Turkey will continue to take all kinds of measures in the vicinity of its border for its national security," a written statement on the Turkish Presidency's website read.

It also accused the US-backed YPG and its political parent the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of "ethnic cleansing" in Syria.

Having risen to prominence as the primary partner of the US-led coalition in the war on the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, the YPG has become a significant irritant to the Turkish state as they made territorial gains and secured a self-declared Kurdish autonomy.

Erdogan last week said his doors were not closed to the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime whose fall he demanded for years, provided that the two sides agreed on crushing the Kurdish region known as Rojava.

Turkey considers the YPG as a branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), thus a "terror" group, a view not shared by the US, the Coalition and Russia.

In August 2016, Turkey launched an incursion into an IS-held pocket of land in the west of the River Euphrates, northern Syria, to deny the YPG further territorial expansion and a chance to unite Afrin with the rest of Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan.

Since the beginning of the Idlib mission in October, the Turkish army has installed a dozen observation points in Idlib, surrounding the town and its some 360 villages from the south as well. Turkey is already its neighbor from the west and the north.

Editing by Sam A.