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ISTANBUL/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Turkey will mount a military operation in northeast Syria, it said on Saturday, after accusing Washington of not doing enough to expel Syrian Kurdish fighters from its border.

The air and ground operation east of the Euphrates river in Syria could start at any time, President Tayyip Erdogan said.

The U.S.-backed force which controls the region, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) led by the Kurdish YPG militia, said it wanted stability but vowed to respond to any attack.

We will not hesitate to turn any unprovoked attack by Turkey into an all-out war on the entire border to defend ourselves and our people, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali said.

NATO allies Ankara and Washington agreed in August to set up a zone in northeast Syria along the border with Turkey, which considers the YPG a terrorist organization linked to Kurdish insurgents at home.

Turkey has accused the United States, which helped the YPG defeat Islamic State militants in Syria, of moving too slowly to create the zone. They are at odds over how far it should extend into Syria and who should control it.

Ankara wants the zone to stretch 30 km (19 miles) inside Syria and to be cleared of YPG fighters. It has repeatedly warned of launching an offensive on its own into northeast Syria, where U.S. forces are stationed alongside the SDF.

Erdogan said Turkey aimed to water the east of Euphrates with fountains of peace and settle refugees there.

We gave all warnings to our interlocutors regarding the east of Euphrates and we have acted with sufficient patience, he said at the opening of his AK Partys annual camp.

Weve made our preparations, weve completed our operation plans, given the necessary instructions. He added that air and ground actions could start as soon as today or tomorrow.

Turkeys state-owned Anadolu Agency said late on Saturday that nine trucks loaded with armored vehicles and one bus carrying military personnel had been sent to the border district of Akcakale, located in the southeastern province of Sanliurfa.

The convoy was sent to reinforce military units based on the Syrian border, Anadolu said. It was not immediately clear whether the shipment was in preparation for an incursion.

Ankara says it wants to settle up to 2 million Syrian refugees in the zone, nearly halving the number sheltering in Turkey from Syrias more than eight-year conflict.

However, the refugee transfer could face resistance from allies opposed to changing the demographic balance of the area. Kurdish leaders have previously accused Turkey of seeking to resettle mainly Arab Syrians from other parts of the country in their region - which Ankara denies.

U.S. and Turkish troops have so far carried out half a dozen joint air missions over northeast Syria and three land patrols, including one on Friday. Washington deems these concrete steps to address Ankaras concerns. Turkey says it is not enough.

Land patrols, air patrols - we are seeing all of these are fiction, Erdogan said on Saturday.

The SDF, which has said it will pull back up to 14 km (8.7 miles) on some parts of the border, is committed to the agreements under U.S.-Turkish talks and will remain so if dangerous threats stop, its spokesman Bali said.

Kurdish commanders have warned that a Turkish border attack would lead to a resurgence of Islamic State militants, from which the SDF seized vast territory in north and east Syria.

Simply, there will be a big gap in the towns that our forces will withdraw from to go to defend the border, and this will give Daesh the opportunity to return, Bali said.

In recent years, the Turkish military has launched two offensives with its Syrian insurgent allies in the northwest of the country and has forces stationed there.

Turkeys rebel allies pledged on Friday to back an offensive by Ankara east of the Euphrates, blaming the YPG for displacing Arabs from the region.

Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul and Ellen Francis in Beirut; Editing by Alexander Smith, Frances Kerry, Kirsten Donovan and Daniel Wallis

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Erdogan says Turkey to launch military operation in northeast ...

Government supporters remain convinced that anti-Erdogan bias in the West is misconceived and point out that Turkey is - among other things - the worlds largest host of refugees.

It became the main route for those crossing to Europe, with thousands boarding dinghies every night from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands, and many drowning en route.

Turkey struck a deal with the EU to stem the flow - sending failed asylum seekers back. Its widely believed that European leaders have tempered their criticism of Erdogan because they needed his co-operation on migrants.

But in some Western capitals, anger at Turkeys unpredictable leader is growing. The European Parliament called for a suspension of EU membership negotiations.

In Turkey, this referendum will be a turning point. A yes would greatly strengthen Erdogans hand, giving him unprecedented power and possibly allowing him to remain in office until 2029, as well as virtually guaranteeing him and his family immunity from any attempts at prosecution.

A no would not spell the end for him - but would embolden the Turkish opposition and provide a chance for a political challenge.

Whichever way it goes, the chasm between Turkey and the West has grown dramatically.

Some blame Erdogan for that but others see the fault with the EU - that it had a window of opportunity after opening negotiations in 2005 to coax Erdogan into long-lasting reforms.

Instead, the argument goes, the EU gave way to the rhetoric of the likes of Frances Nicolas Sarkozy, who called Turkish membership unthinkable.

Turkey sensed it would continue to be held in the EUs waiting room.

Sadly, Europe sees President Erdogan and Turkey as an other through which to deflect their internal problems onto a distant and imaginary enemy, wrote Ibrahim Kalin, the presidents spokesman.

It only deepens the sense of mistrust that is already poisoning relations between Turkey and Europe on the one hand and Islamic and Western societies on the other.

Turkey matters. It remains a vital Western ally in the region, Natos eastern flank and a big trading partner. It is a crucial player in attempts to bring peace to Syria and the war against so-called Islamic State.

As it tries, with faltering success, to pivot more towards Russia and Gulf States, that could have a considerable geopolitical impact. The West cannot afford to lose this country.

Democracy is like a train, Erdogan once famously said. You get off once you have reached your destination.

Some believe he has many stations left to pass, others that this country is in the midst of a slow-motion train crash. This could be the crowning moment or the undoing of Erdogans Turkey.

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Erdogan's Turkey - BBC News

The US ultimatum gave Turkey very few days in which to choose between Nato and Russia. Either Ankara dropped the deal with the Ruskies to adopt their S-400 missile system or US punitive actions followed by the first week of June. The newly announced temporary band-aid of a joint US-Turkey study group will only postpone the reckoning. It will not resolve the fundamental issue of why Turkey's President Erdogan wants Moscow's missiles. He wants them badly. Considering what that means for Turkey's economy and defense capability, President Erdogan's obstinacy might seem baffling. The Turks would lose participation in the F-35 fighter jet program and ultimately all the privileges of integration with the Western alliance, infrastructure investments, bond underwriting, debt-service guarantees and much else. Turkish banks could ultimately face exclusion from the Swift system. Not the whole package at first but the very threat of increasing pressure would deflate the economy and devalue the currency sharply. The dark era of 1970s post-Cyprus-invasion misery could recur blackouts, shortages, insurgency, bunker economics.

Why would Ankara flirt with such disasters? Why broach the missile deal in the first place? You'd have to be highly motivated to incur such risks for your country. What is motivating Erdogan? After all, he has systematically reduced all institutional checks to his rule. Including the ballot box: He's in the process of neutralizing that too with a June 23 rerun of the recent municipal elections which his party lost. He has the country firmly in his grip. Why does he need Russian missiles? Answer: because his own military still worries him. Especially a military tied to Western weapons and training and indoctrination which makes it the last institution to be potentially independent-minded. He doesn't forget the air force jets that bombed the capital and challenged his own civilian airliner during the attempted coup.

Air force officers need to be highly literate. They tend to belong to the educated, more secular classes. They often spend years abroad learning their technical skills. In short, they're comprised of Erdogan's anti-demographic. He is right to fear them more than their land and sea counterparts. In general, as happened during the coup attempt, rebellious armed forces can be opposed and marginalized via media propaganda by flooding the streets with political supporters. But a mutinous air force presents an altogether different kind of threat. You might own the media but they own the skies; you can't hide strafing jets from the public. Anywhere in the country. They can intimidate or inflame, alter the psychological balance, fly over your supporters and find you. Most crucially, you can't shoot them down. And here's the rub. Nato radar and missiles are programmed to avoid targeting their own kind, ostensibly to prevent friendly fire incidents. As a result, should there be another coup attempt, forces loyal to President Erdogan manning Nato ground-to-air weapons cannot defend against Nato-built aircraft. But S-400 Russian missiles can.

That's why Erdogan is so highly motivated to buy the Kremlin's missile systems. Motivated enough to risk taking the entire country towards sanctions and economic catastrophe. No doubt, as a neo-Ottomanist he believes he can adopt strategic neutrality as the Turks did in the pre-and-post WWI years, playing both sides against the middle. Some around him have made noises implying that the West cannot afford to lose Turkey, or let it collapse, therefore Erdogan can defy the West as much as he wants. This is a dangerous fantasy. Neither Nato nor Europe can afford a radicalized, unstable or hostile state right on its borders, potentially locking up the Mediterranean's eastern shores as the Ottomans once did.

Erdogan may try to temporize for a while but he will have to choose one side or the other in the end, just as Yanukovych had to do in Ukraine. Yanukovych chose Moscow, which led to Maidan riots and his exile. Erdogan is not quite there yet but he is certainly girding his loins for the moment of truth when he might end up choosing Moscow despite huge Western pressure. The signs are there. He talks openly about building the successor S-500 system jointly with Russia. He fulminated publicly several times against Turkey being forced to join the renewed embargoes on Iran's economy, until he caved earlier this month (more about that later). He is building Russian nuclear power plants in the country. I wrote about his visit to Caracas in a previous column. He signed a deal making Turkey chief buyer of Venezuela's raw gold. Like oil and uranium, gold is a currency substitute, indeed a kind of currency. It acts as a hedge against sanctions. It prepares the economy for life outside the international banking system.

That's where all this is headed. And if he thinks, as he seems to, that there is a perfectly tolerable existence for the country outside that system, he needs to look again at the other countries now inhabiting that zone Syria, Venezuela, Iran and the like. Erdogan may hope that his newfound ally in the Kremlin will help uphold him but, historically, Moscow never harbored any sentimental impulses toward Turkey. There's no longterm guarantee of stability in embracing the Kremlin. Think realpolitik: the Kremlin wins just as conclusively if Turkey falls apart no more Nato eastern flank, no more impediment between Russia and the Mediterranean, no more pro-Western strategic architecture from Greece all the way to India. No more Ankara-funded resistance to Assad in Idlib.

Turkey could easily become Venezuela or even Syria. Or, at best, another Iran, with pseudo-democratic processes and a permanent governing elite furnishing a modicum of stability. Tragically, as we see in those countries, the elites responsible for pushing things that way don't necessarily lose. As the economy moves into the dark side, it concentrates in the hands of regime oligarchs who join the alternative global finance system - of massive hidden funds moving between tax havens, freeports, off-shore banks, failed states, and the like. Which is why, in the end, Erdogan probably didn't really mind adding Turkey to the countries enforcing sanctions on Iran. The rest of the population may lose the benefits of trading with its neighbor but the political elites usually find ways to profit in the shadows. The December 2017 Zarrab court case in New York which I covered in a two-parter in this column demonstrated how Turkish bankers did just that for their political masters.

As the economy in rogue countries shapes into clusters of pyramids topped by loyalist oligarchs those outside the patronage deltas find survival increasingly hard. They join up or they emigrate in large numbers. Thus the power structure consolidates itself. That approach is now a full-fledged recognizable system, one that we see replicated in country after country. It started in Putin's Russia and is now emulated widely. Because those countries have to use the same alternate global black money network, they are driven willy-nilly into each others' arms, however politically averse they may be. In effect, the Kremlin is building a new economic bloc as of old to rival the West's and Turkey looks about to become the latest member to join.

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Why Turkey's President Erdogan Wants Those Russian Missiles

FOR EIGHT years, Turkeys public enemy number one, Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), had not been allowed to meet his lawyers. Hundreds of other Kurdish inmates went on hunger strike in late 2018 to demand an end to his isolation. At least eight committed suicide. The blackout ended on May 2nd, when a pair of lawyers visited Mr Ocalan in his island prison on the Marmara Sea, where he has been held for nearly two decades.

The news was quickly overshadowed by political drama. Only four days after the visit Turkeys election board voted to overturn the outcome of a mayoral election in Istanbul, in which the opposition scored a remarkable upset, and ordered a repeat.

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The two decisions, to reopen channels with Mr Ocalan and to try to overturn the mayoral vote, could not have happened without the involvement of Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, analysts say. Many of them see a connection.

More than any other group, it was Kurdish voters who helped the oppositions candidate for Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, score a narrow victory in late March.

Displaced from villages and towns in Turkeys south-east by decades of war between the PKK and the army, as well as poverty, millions of Kurds have settled in the west of the country. Istanbuls population of 15m people includes at least 2m Kurds, more than in any city in the mainly Kurdish south-east of the country. Most of them support the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), an alliance of liberals and Kurdish nationalists, which did not field its own candidate in the Istanbul vote, and endorsed Mr Imamoglu instead. On election day over 80% of the HDPs voters backed Mr Imamoglu, according to research by TEPAV, a think-tank. The remainder appear to have abstained.

To win the repeat election, Mr Erdogans Justice and Development (AK) party might have to reel in at least some of the abstainers, as well as conservative Kurds, to secure the election of its candidate, a former prime minister, Binali Yildrim. Erdogans loss has entirely to do with Kurdish dissent, says Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He might have to pivot to the Kurds simply to keep power.

The decision to allow Mr Ocalan to meet his lawyers appears to be part of the outreach, says Ms Aydintasbas. The move comes amid rumours that Turkish spooks recently met members of the PKKs Syrian franchise, known as the YPG, to discuss a possible safe zone in Syrias north-east. Despite opposition from America, which teamed up with the YPG to crush Islamic States caliphate, Mr Erdogans government has repeatedly threatened to attack the YPGs strongholds in Syria. In a statement passed on to his lawyers, Mr Ocalan called on Turkey and the Kurdish insurgents to shun violence and pursue a settlement within the framework of a united Syria.

To make any new inroads with Kurdish voters ahead of the repeat election in Istanbul, scheduled for June 23rd, Mr Erdogan will have to do much more than put out feelers to the PKKs leader. During his first decade in power, Turkeys strongman offered the Kurds new cultural rights and launched peace talks with the separatists. Over the past four years, however, he has presided over ruthless army operations against PKK fighters in cities across the south-east, the arrests of thousands of Kurdish activists, an alliance with Turkish ultranationalists, plus what many Kurds consider a land grab in Syrias Afrin province. Mr Erdogan has just over a month to chip away at that legacy. He may be too late.

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Why Erdogan needs the Kurds if he hopes to win a repeat ...

ATHENS, Greece (AP) Nine people jailed before a 2017 visit by Turkeys president and accused of belonging to a militant group were cleared of terrorism and criminal arms charges in Greece on Wednesday.

Defense lawyer Aleca Zorbala said that the Athens court acquitted three of the defendants of all charges. The others received sentences of two years and seven months in prison for misdemeanor weapons possession and forged documents. All nine were in jail since November 2017.

The prosecutor at the trial had also called for the defendants to be acquitted of the terrorism charges.

There was no evidence, Zorbala said.

The arrests followed a major anti-terrorism police operation days before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans visit.

They were charged with belonging to the far-left Revolutionary Peoples Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union.

Zorbala said her clients arrests were linked with the Turkish leaders visit.

The timing was not at all a coincidence, she said. (Greek authorities) wanted to show Erdogan that people he considers to be terrorists face arrest here and that he would be safe in Greece.

The defendants are of Kurdish, Turkish or Arab origin. Six are recognized political refugees.

Originally founded in the late 1970s as Dev Sol, the Marxist-Leninist DHKP-C is believed to be responsible for a string of assassinations and bombings in Turkey, including a 2013 suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.

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Greek court clears 9 jailed before Erdogan visit