Date: Mar 20, 2018 Source: The Daily Star Turkey will expand Afrin campaign if necessary Reuters ANKARA: Turkish forces will press their offensive against Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighters along the length of Turkey’s border with Syria and if necessary into northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday, threatening wider conflict in Syria’s civil war. Meanwhile to the south in Eastern Ghouta, activists say 15 children were killed in an airstrike on a school, as the Syrian government hints at a possible deal struck with rebels. A day after Turkish troops swept into Afrin, the main town in a pocket of Kurdish-controlled territory in northwest Syria, Erdogan said Turkey would also target a region stretching nearly 400 kilometers east to the town of Qamishli. Expanding Turkey’s military campaign into the much larger Kurdish-held territory further east would risk confronting troops of a NATO ally, the United States, that are deployed alongside a YPG-dominated force in northern Syria. “By controlling Afrin city center yesterday, we have passed the most important step of the Olive Branch operation,” Erdogan told a gathering of judges and prosecutors in Ankara. “After this, we will continue now to Manbij, Ayn al-Arab, Tel Abyad, Ras al-Ain and Qamishli until this corridor is fully removed,” he said, referring to a string of towns along Syria’s border region with Turkey. Turkish authorities have described the stretch of northern Syria under Kurdish control as a “terror corridor” on the long southern border. The U.S. called for those in the area to focus on defeating Daesh (ISIS), de-escalating conflict and protecting civilian lives, Pentagon spokesman Col. Robert Manning said. Turkey is also concerned about the presence in northern Iraq of militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has waged the insurgency in Turkey since the 1980s. The PKK has been based in the Qandil mountain region near Iraq’s border with Iran, but Erdogan said a “second Qandil” was being established in Sinjar, further west. He said Turkey had told the Iraqi government to deal with the threat. “If you are unable to handle it, we can suddenly come into Sinjar one night and clean the PKK from there. If we are friends, if we are brothers, then you will provide us with the necessary facilitations.” Turkey’s prime minister Binali Yildirim was holding talks with the Iraqi government, Erdogan added. “However, if this issue is prolonged much longer there will be an Olive Branch there too.” Earlier Monday government spokesman Bekir Bozdag said Turkish forces would return Afrin to its “real owners” after driving the YPG out. A Syrian Kurdish official told Reuters that over 200,000 people who had fled the Afrin offensive were without shelter, food or water in nearby areas. “The people with cars are sleeping in the cars, the people without are sleeping under the trees with their children,” said Hevi Mustafa, a senior member of the Afrin civil authority. The International Committee of the Red Cross called for greater access to the civilian population of Afrin. It said the Turkish Red Crescent aid group lacked credibility among Syrian Kurds after Turkey’s military operation. In Eastern Ghouta, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 15 children sheltering in a school were killed in an airstrike. A Syrian government minister also said that some rebels in the enclave may soon agree to withdraw or accept rule by the Syrian state. Ali Haidar, the Syrian minister responsible for national reconciliation, told Reuters in an interview that rebels around the town of Harasta – one of three rebel pockets in Eastern Ghouta – may be ready to cut a deal. Haidar said there were contacts with rebels and “to a certain extent there are acceptable results in part of the file.” Rebels in Eastern Ghouta have publicly ruled out the kind of negotiated withdrawal that helped Assad recover Aleppo, Homs and other areas, though figures close to rebels have said indirect talks have been underway to secure such an agreement.