Syria rebels clash with Kurds in Aleppo as peace talks approach

Rebels fighting to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad have clashed with Kurdish paramilitaries in Aleppo, in some of Syria’s most intense fighting since a truce brokered by international powers came into effect late last month.

Despite the weekend fighting, talks aimed at reaching a political deal to end the five-year conflict appear set to resume, with a top official for the umbrella opposition group saying it would likely send a delegation to Geneva.

“Our inclination is to go,” Riad Nassan Agha, a member of the High Negotiations Committee, told Reuters. He said members of the opposition delegation would start arriving in the Swiss city on Friday, cautioning that the HNC hoped nothing would happen to prevent its attendance.

The talks followed a truce brokered by the US and Russia, the latter of which intervened in the war last autumn in an effort to preserve the rule of its embattled ally Assad. But the “cessation of hostilities” agreement has not prevented sporadic bouts of violence from erupting in the country.

Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, fired about 100 shells into Sheikh Maksud, a neighbourhood controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Aleppo, and clashes resumed on Monday between rebels based in the city and the Kurdish militia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a network with many contacts inside the country.

Aleppo is divided between the regime and the opposition, but has been subjected to a major Russia-backed offensive in its northern countryside aimed at severing rebel supply lines to Turkey.

The latest clashes are part of a broader power struggle across Syria’s north in a multilayered war – the Kurdish YPG has sought to take advantage of the chaos to broaden the area under its control, wresting territory from the opposition near the Turkish border, which critics fear is intended for an autonomous Kurdish statelet.

Ankara, which supports the rebels, has looked on with alarm at the YPG’s advance, as it is fighting its own insurgency in Kurdish areas in the south-east and views the Syrian Kurdish paramilitaries as another wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), with which it is fighting.

A spokesman and close aide of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the YPG of providing targeting data that has allowed the Russian air force to bomb the rebels, a claim that is likely to further strain relations with the US, which has strongly backed the YPG, to Turkey’s consternation.

Ibrahim Kalın, Erdoğan’s spokesman, said Turkey might consider airstrikes on the YPG forces in the vicinity of Azaz, a strategic border town that provides the rebels with a lifeline to Turkey. “We have reports that they in fact work in coordination on the ground, they speak to the Russian commanders and they on the ground provide coordinates to the Russians and the airplanes come and bomb those areas and then the YPG forces move in,” Kalın said at a press briefing last weekend for foreign journalists in the Turkish capital, hours before the ceasefire began.

“YPG is trying to change the demographics on the Syrian side in non-Kurdish areas,” he added. “For the future of Syria this will obviously present huge challenges and threats for the territorial integrity and political stability of Syria.”

Kalın also said that if Aleppo were to fall, it would drive hundreds of thousands of additional refugees to Turkey, but Ankara would take them in if that occurred.

He said Turkey had evidence of cross-border cooperation, arms transfers and recruitment in concert with the PKK, which he said was an indication of the close ties of the two groups. He said the government in Ankara was willing to reconcile with the Syrian Kurdish group if it disavowed the Assad government, joined the opposition and severed its ties with the PKK.

He said other opposition groups in Syria would be equally effective in fightingIslamic State if they were provided with the same level of support and aid that is given to the YPG by the US.

But tensions over the YPG’s partnership with the US-led coalition in Syria are likely to rise further still, amid reports that Washington had nearly finished setting up an airbase in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria and was proceeding with the construction of a second base for dual military and civilian use. The Irbil-based news website BasNews, quoting a military source in the Kurdish-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), said most of the work on a runway in the oil town of Rmeilan, in Hasaka, was complete while a new airbase south-east of Kobani, straddling the Turkish border, was being constructed.

A spokesman for US central command told Reuters, however, that the US was not taking control of any airfields in Syria.

The source in the US-backed alliance told the Kurdish website that scores of American experts and technicians were involved in the project.

Syrian Kurdish officials had recently said the Rmeilan airstrip was being used byUS military helicopters for logistics and deliveries.

The US sent dozens of special operations troops to northern Syria last year to advise opposition forces in their fight against Isis. They have also dropped supplies of munitions to rebels in the province.