Turkey pounded Kurdish militia in northeast Syria for a second day on Thursday (10 October), forcing tens of thousands of people to flee and killing dozens, in a cross-border assault on US allies that has turned the Washington establishment against Donald Trump.
The Turkish offensive against the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, launched days after Trump pulled US troops out of the way, opens one of the biggest new fronts in years in an eight-year-old civil war that has drawn in global powers.
Footage posted online showed armoured vehicles firing shells and plumes of smoke rising in towns.
At least 23 fighters with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and six fighters with a Turkish-backed Syrian rebel group had been killed, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s eight-year-old war.
The SDF said Turkish air strikes and shelling had also killed nine civilians. In an apparent attempt by Kurdish-led forces to retaliate, mortar fire from Syria killed three people including a child in the Turkish border town of Akcakale, hospital and security sources said.
