Warplanes strike Daesh targets in Syria

Turkish warplanes destroyed 12 Daesh targets while one Turkish soldier was killed in a clash with militants during an offensive in northern Syria, Turkey’s military said on Saturday. 
Turkey and Syrian rebels are carrying out an operation to push the radicals from the border after an airstrike on Thursday killed three Turkish soldiers. The Turkish military believes the strike was carried out by the Syrian air force.
President Tayyip Erdogan discussed that attack with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Friday. Russia is Syrian President Bashar Assad’s main military backer, while Turkey backs the rebels fighting to oust him.
The latest Turkish airstrikes and clash occurred over the last 24 hours in a Turkey-backed operation by Syrian rebels, dubbed Euphrates Shield, to drive both the radical and a Kurdish militia away from the Syrian side of the Turkish border.
The Turkish solder was killed in a clash as Syrian rebels gained control of northern Syria’s Anifah district, the armed forces said in a daily statement on the operation.
State-run Anadolu agency said three Turkish soldiers were also wounded in the clash. The death toll of Turkish soldiers in the Euphrates Shield operation, launched on Aug. 24, is 18.
The killing of the Turkish soldiers on Thursday — the first anniversary of Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet over Syria — raised fears of an escalation in an already complex battlefield.
Ankara and Moscow only restored ties, which had been damaged by the jet incident, in August. While they continue to pursue conflicting goals in Syria, Turkey has of late been less openly critical of Assad than in the past. 
Meanwhile, a string of explosions Saturday rocked a munitions storage site in northeastern Syria used by the US-led coalition battling the Daesh group, a monitor and a local official said.
“At least five explosions occurred on Saturday morning at the arms and munitions depots in a base close to Tal Tamer” northwest of the city of Hasakah, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
He said the base was used by Kurdish forces from the People’s Protection Units (YPG) as well as members of the international coalition fighting Daesh in Syria and neighboring Iraq.
A local Kurdish official said a number of people were injured in the blasts and loaded on to ambulances. It was not clear if there were any US personnel on the base at the time of the blasts.
A witness told AFP that “successive explosions occurred between 10.30 am and 11 am (0830-0900 GMT)” and said ambulances and firefighters arrived swiftly on the scene.
Two deals to evacuate rebels and their weapons from parts of the Damascus suburbs have been reached, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday, as government attacks on the remaining opposition-held areas around the capital intensify.
The evacuation deals are part of the Syrian government’s attempts to conclude local agreements with rebels in besieged areas that have resulted in rebels being given safe passage to insurgent-controlled areas.
Rebels say the agreements are part of a government strategy to forcibly displace populations from opposition-held areas after years of siege and bombardment.
An agreement to start evacuating rebels and their weapons from rebel-held Khan Al-Shih will start to be implemented now, said sources.

Source: Arab News