Turkey will launch a fresh military offensive in Syria against the Kurdish YPG militant group if the latter fails to disband and lay down its arms, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said.
“Those classified as international terrorist fighters—coming from Turkey, Iran, and Iraq—must leave [Syria] immediately.”
The YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which for decades has waged an armed insurgency against the Turkish state.
Ankara, along with Brussels and Washington, regards the PKK as a terrorist group.
In recent years, NATO member Turkey has conducted several offensives in northern Syria—with which it shares a 565-mile-long border—with the aim of “neutralizing” the PKK and its Syrian affiliate.
Ankara accuses both groups of seeking to carve out an autonomous enclave in the region from which it could potentially launch attacks on Turkish targets.
Despite its close ties to the PKK terrorist group, the YPG is a leading component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is armed and supported by the United States.
The Syrian Democratic Forces was established in 2015 to help U.S. forces in northeastern Syria—currently estimated at some 2,000 troops—combat the ISIS terrorist group.
An ideological offshoot of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, ISIS overran vast swaths of Syria and next-door neighbor Iraq in the period from 2014 to 2019.
Washington often describes the YPG—to the annoyance of Ankara—as a “reliable partner” in the fight against ISIS.
The partnership has led to frequent friction with Turkey, which has repeatedly urged the United States to halt its support for the group.
On Jan. 6, Fidan said that Western support for the YPG in the name of fighting ISIS would no longer be tolerated by Ankara.
At a joint news conference with his Jordanian counterpart, he said that the eradication of the YPG was “imminent.”
“We are in a position to not only see but also to break, any kind of plot in the region,” Fidan told reporters.
Appeal to Damascus
For the past several years, Turkey and allied militia groups have controlled swaths of territory in northern Syria.These include Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, from which last month’s rebel offensive—led by U.S.-designated terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—was carried out.
That offensive led to the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow on Dec. 8, 2024, as his government and army collapsed.
As the rebels advanced on Syrian capital Damascus in early December 2024, the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army carried out a separate offensive in northern Syria, where it wrested significant territory from the YPG.
Days later, Washington announced that it had brokered a cease-fire deal between Turkey and the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
“We don’t want to see any party take advantage of the current unstable situation,” a State Department spokesman said at the time.
Soon afterward, Ankara denied that any truce had been reached.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, for its part, accused Turkey of derailing efforts to achieve a cease-fire.
“The Turkish occupation and its mercenaries did not abide by this decision and continued their attacks,” the U.S.-backed group said in a statement.
Since Assad’s departure last month, Ankara has stepped up its calls for the YPG to be disarmed and disbanded and for its non-Syrian members to be repatriated to their home countries.
Asked by reporters what Turkey would do if Damascus failed to resolve the issue, Fidan responded, “Whatever is necessary.”
