Around 300 more Russian military police have arrived in Syria, the defense ministry said on Friday, under an accord between Ankara and Moscow which halted Turkey’s military incursion into northeast Syria.
The deal reached on Tuesday by Presidents Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin requires that Russian military police and Syrian border guards remove all Kurdish YPG militia from within 30 km (19 miles) of the Turkish border by next Tuesday.
The military police, from the southern Russian region of Chechnya, will patrol and help with the withdrawal of Kurdish forces and their weapons to 30 km of the Syrian-Turkish border, Interfax news agency reported the ministry as saying.
Ankara regards the YPG as a terrorist group aligned with Kurdish militants who have waged an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984. Turkey launched its cross-border offensive against the YPG on Oct. 9 after U.S. President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of northeast Syria.
