Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday Russian officials had told Turkish authorities that YPG fighters had withdrawn from a tape on the Syrian-Turkish border within a 150-hour deadline set by Ankara and Moscow.
Under an agreement signed a week ago between Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Syrian border guards and Russian military police had to remove all members of the YPG and their weapons from a "safe zone" 30 kilometers south of the Turkish-Syrian border by 3 pm GMT yesterday. .
After that date, Russian and Turkish troops will begin joint patrols in a narrower 10-kilometer deep area on the Syrian side of the border.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Ministry of Defense announced the launch of reconnaissance flights and clearance operations in an area of about 10 km inside Syria, and is scheduled to conduct joint patrols with Russian forces after the withdrawal of Kurdish fighters.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said earlier that the YPG had completed its withdrawal before the deadline, but a senior aide to Erdogan said Turkey would now be confirmed through planned joint patrols with Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry, citing a senior military official working in Syria, Major-General Yuri Burenkov, said 68 Kurdish defense units of 34,000 had withdrawn from the "safe zone" with their weapons and equipment by the deadline.
Borenkov also said the Syrian army had set up 84 border posts on the Syrian-Turkish border.
Turkey has vowed, in the words of its Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, that it would move to "eliminate" the Kurdish fighters if it is found that their withdrawal from the border region in northeast Syria.
"As we agreed, we have stopped the attack, but in that area of northeastern Syria, if we see any PKK or PKK terrorists, we will not hesitate to move to eliminate them," Gavishoglu told a joint news conference with his Russian and Iranian counterparts at the UN headquarters in Geneva. ".