Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the country has launched a ground offensive in northern Syria to establish a "safe zone".
Erdogan said that the Turkey ground offensive in northern Syria is part of an initiative to establish a "safe zone" cleared of Kurdish militias that will also accommodate Syrian refugees.
The decision to sent troops has received wide condemnation, with the European Union (EU) calling on Turkey to end its offensive against the Kurdish-led forces who were key US allies. The offensive began days after President Donald Trump withdrew US troops from the border area, which also received criticism in the US and beyond.
However, Trump, who earlier threatened to "obliterate" Turkey's economy if it went "off limits," issued a statement saying that the US did not "endorse this attack" and called the operation a "bad idea".
The Kurds were part of the group that defeated the Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria and are currently guarding thousands of IS fighters and their relatives in prisons and camps in areas under their control. If a battle breaks out between the Kurdish militias and the Turkey military, there is uncertainty on the fate of these prisoners.
United Kingdom (UK) Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab expressed "serious concerns" about the offensive, arguing that it "risks destabilising the region, exacerbating humanitarian suffering, and undermining the progress made against" the IS.
On a Twitter post, Erdogan claimed that the offensive's mission "was to prevent the creation of a terror corridor across our southern border, and to bring peace to the area", vowing to "preserve Syria's territorial integrity and liberate local communities from terrorists."
Turkey treats the Kurdish YPG militia, the dominant force in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for three decades.
