It's official: Turkey’s military offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces in Afrin has disrupted the US-led coalition’s fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. The Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which spearheads the fight against IS there, is redeploying hundreds of its men and women to defend Afrin, a mainly Kurdish city in northwestern Syria. The result is what a Pentagon spokesman yesterday labeled “an operational pause” in the ground campaign against IS remnants in the Euphrates River Valley bordering Iraq.
Col. Rob Manning sought to downplay the significance of the hiatus, telling reporters US airstrikes against IS holdouts in the area are continuing. “The nature of our mission in Syria has not changed,” he said, adding the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes thousands of Arab fighters, remained the coalition’s “major partner” in the battle against the jihadis.
At a news conference on Tuesday, the SDF confirmed it would pull 1,700 fighters out of areas of eastern Syria in order to bolster its defenses in Afrin. "We took the difficult decision to pull our forces out of Deir ez-Zor province and battlefronts against [IS] to head to the Afrin battle," Abu Omar al-Idlibi, an SDF commander, told Agence France-Presse. "We fought [IS]. We helped the coalition in Raqqa, but without the coalition defending its partners," Idlibi said. "Our people in Afrin are our priority. Protecting them is more important than the international coalition's decisions.”
A Western official familiar with coalition planning said the decision to suspend the ground offensive was “not new.” The official told Al-Monitor on condition of strict anonymity, “It's not the YPG saying ‘you know what, we’re stopping.’ It’s the fact that they pulled fighters to Afrin and to complete the last, very difficult phase of operations against [IS], the coalition needs those fighters.” The official continued, “So the major offensive maneuvers over the vast stretch of territory in the east have paused. There are a ton of Arab fighters down there but the last phase is a fairly significant operation. Arabs don’t want to do it without the Kurds. But we are still killing IS every day."
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