A battle raged Saturday in the key Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn as Kurdish fighters tried to fend off Turkish-backed military forces.
Turkey claimed to have taken the town after heavy shelling forced Kurdish troops into a retreat.
The Turkish government posted photos of empty streets and Syrian rebels standing on Kurdish militia flags, Reuters reported.
“Inspections are being conducted in residential areas,” a senior Turkish security official said. “Mine and booby trap searches are being carried out.”
But a Kurdish spokesman said a counterattack started “and there are very fierce clashes now.”
The assault came four days after President Trump cleared the way for Turkey’s air and ground offensive by pulling back US forces from the area.
But Turkey’s aggressiveness has triggered a rising international outcry.
Germany has halted arms exports to Turkey, a NATO ally, and France said sanctions against Turkey would be discussed at next week’s European Union summit. The US is also considering sanctions.
“You are leaving us to be slaughtered,” the commander of the Kurdish-led forces told a senior US diplomat.
He demanded to know whether the US would do anything to protect Syrian Kurds, who lost 11,000 fighters battling ISIS alongside US troops.
“You are not willing to protect the people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us. This is immoral,” Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi told William Roebuck, an envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, according to CNN.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks Syria’s civil war, said 74 Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force fighters have been killed since Wednesday as well as 49 Syrian opposition fighters backed by Turkey.
The civilian toll on the Turkish side of the border rose to 18, while 30 civilians have been killed on the Syrian side.
A US official familiar with the situation told CNN there was mounting concern that Turkey’s operation in Syria has grown, and that Ankara was seeking to control an area from the Iraq border to parts of northwest Syria.
That zone is inhabited mostly by Kurds.
Turkish officials had previously communicated to the US that the scope of the operation was narrower.
The US official said Friday’s artillery strikes near US troops around Kobani are evidence Turkey is operating beyond the areas it had indicated to the US.
With Post wires
