Turkey Calls for Ground Operations in Syria

Feb 16, 2016, 20:08

The Turkish army hit YPG positions in Syria for a third day on Monday following an attack on a border security outpost in the Turkish province of Hatay, foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said.

In response, Syria's ambassador to Russia, Riad Haddad, accused the United States of bombing the MSF hospital and said that "Russian warplanes had nothing to do with any of it".

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Russian Federation is not bombing hospitals and schools in northern Syria, calling such reports "unsubstantiated accusations".

The Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, has also expressed doubts: "Who will speak to the terrorists if a terrorist organisation refused to adhere to the ceasefire?"

"The destruction of the hospital leaves the local population of about 40,000 people without access to medical services in an active zone of conflict", said Massimiliano Rebaudengo, MSF's head of mission in Syria.

Turkey on Tuesday (Feb 16) called for a joint ground operation in Syria with its worldwide allies, adding that such an intervention was the only way to stop the country's five-year civil war.

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The Observatory also reported 10 civilians, including three children, were killed in suspected Russian strikes in and nearby Azaz that hit near a hospital, it said.

Doctors Without Borders said seven people died when a hospital it funds in Maarat al-Numan, in Idlib province, was bombed.

The projected truce agreed on Friday in Munich was to begin in a week, but there was no sign that would happen.

Turkish artillery has struck at Kurdish militia targets in Syria over the past few days, creating a rare rift between Ankara and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, the United States.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Monday that they will not allow the Kurdish fighters to seize the Syrian town of Azas. The Kurdish YPG militia - which Turkey regards as a hostile insurgent force - has exploited the situation, seizing ground from Syrian rebels to extend its presence along the border.

The Observatory and al-Halaby said an air raid struck a school in the village of Kaljibrin, near Azaz. Meanwhile, the US think otherwise as it supports the group in its bid to fight Islamic State rebels in Syria. The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, corroborated his account.

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Ankara accuses the Kurdish forces of ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey.

In a related development, official Russian statements regarding the ground operation that a number of Arab countries and Turkey are determined to carry out in Syria to combat ISIS appeared to be contradictory yesterday. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Also Tuesday, government forces and allied gunmen captured a power station in eastern Aleppo from IS that the extremists had used as a jailhouse.

He said he believed Russian or Syrian military forces were behind the attack.

United Nations peace envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura arrived Monday in Damascus, a government source there said, amid the ceasefire push.

He said they would meet again later on Tuesday "to address this urgent issue which is as you know related to the wellbeing of all Syrian people and is connected to the very clear discussions and conclusions of the Munich conference". "We will not allow Azaz to fall", Davutoglu told reporters on his plane bound for Ukraine, Reuters reported.

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