Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front says it has quit frontline positions against the self-styled Islamic State (IS) north of Aleppo and ceded them to other rebels, leaving an area of northern Syria where Turkey wants to set up a buffer zone.
Nusra Front’s statement criticised a Turkish-US plan to drive IS from the Syrian-Turkish border area, saying the aim was to serve “Turkey’s national security” rather than the fight against President Bashar al-Assad.
The United States and Turkey last month announced their intention to drive IS from a strip of territory in northern Syria near the Turkish border in a campaign that would provide air cover for Syrian rebels in the area.
Though Nusra is an enemy of IS, its foothold in northern Syria has been a problem for the US-led campaign against the ultra-hardline group. Late last month, Nusra attacked Syrian rebels trained as part of the US-led campaign against Islamic State, calling them agents of US interests.
Nusra said Turkey was acting to prevent the formation of a Kurdish state in northern Syria, and the Turkish government and the US-led alliance against IS were seeking to direct the battle according to their priorities.
“Facing this current scene, our only option was to withdraw and leave our frontline positions (with IS) in the northern Aleppo countryside for any fighting faction in these areas to take over,” the Nusra Front said.
Syrian rebels taking part in the plan as ground forces were not doing so voluntarily, it added.
The Nusra Front said it would maintain frontlines with IS in other areas including Hama province and the Qalamoun mountain range at the border with Lebanon.
The planned buffer would prevent a powerful Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, from further expanding a zone of control that already stretches some 400 kilometres along the Syrian-Turkish border. The YPG has seized wide areas of territory from IS this year, backed by US-led air strikes.
Insurgent sources said Nusra had handed over two villages north of Aleppo to an alliance of rebel groups operating in the area known as Jabhat al-Shamiya, or the Levant Front.
The Nusra Front is one of the most powerful insurgent groups fighting in the four-year-long Syrian war that has estimated to have killed a quarter of a million people and largely reduced Assad’s control to the cities of western Syria.
