Sourced : The Washington Post
By Louisa Loveluck and Zakaria Zakaria
A Turkish offensive against Kurdish fighters has bogged down in the mountains and mud of northern Syria as troops encounter an adversary well accustomed to the terrain.
The Turkish military lost its advantage in the skies over the border area for much of this week after Russian forces restricted access to the airspace, according to a Western diplomat and Syrian rebels backed by the Turks. Without air cover, the lightly armed Syrian rebels, who are doing most of the fighting in the three-week-old Turkish offensive, have found it hardto advance.
“We are still making progress but not as fast as we did before,” said Majd Mahsoun, a fighter with the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army. “It’s been a tough fight.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched the military operation, involving thousands of Syrian rebels, with the aim of ousting Syrian Kurdish fighters from the border enclave of Afrin. Those fighters are allied with Kurdish separatists inside Turkey, who have been locked in a brutal decades-long conflict with the Turkish state. Erdogan has framed the new offensive as a fight against terrorists.
Read more at : https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/turkeys-offensive-in-syria-runs-into-problems-mountains-and-mud/2018/02/09/42056d6c-0c34-11e8-998c-96deb18cca19_story.html?utm_term=.d0acc52d2461