Most Turks welcome army’s incursion into Kurdish-controlled northern Syria
Many Turks are rallying behind the military operation launched over the weekend to undo the Syrian Kurds’ advances across the border, while activists accuse the government of criminalizing dissent.
ISTANBUL — At a smoke-filled coffee shop in central Istanbul on Wednesday, customers kept one eye on their playing cards and another on a television broadcasting footage of the Turkish military’s incursion into northern Syria. To a man, the crowded room was unanimous in its approval of the operation aimed at thwarting Kurdish militants.
“The state has to fight terrorism at the root,” said Cengiz, 53, a retired hotel worker who did not give his last name. “Hopefully, it will end quickly and we won’t lose many soldiers. But we are prepared to pay the price.”
Behind him, the television showed images from Kilis, a Turkish border town where shelling blamed on Kurdish forces hit a mosque, killing two people.
On Saturday, Turkey began a cross-border operation, dubbed Olive Branch, in Syria’s Afrin province to prevent the US-backed People’s Protection Units (YPG) from consolidating territorial gains in northern Syria, convinced an autonomous Kurdish entity on its southern border would stoke violent separatism among its own, far larger Kurdish population.
