BEIRUT (NYTIMES) – The commander of the US-backed militia in Syria said on Tuesday (Oct 8) that it would attack Turkish forces if they enter north-eastern Syria, while Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, indicated that such an operation was imminent.

“We will resist,” Mazlum Kobani, commander of the Kurdish-led militia, said in an interview with The New York Times.

“We have been at war for seven years, so we can continue the war for seven more years.”

Erdogan, speaking to reporters on a flight to Serbia, said the operation might happen before the news could be printed.

Turkish troops were being bused to the Syrian border in preparation for an incursion, Turkish media reported.

And the Turkish Defence Ministry said on Twitter that preparations to enter Syria “had been completed”.

The escalating challenge came after President Donald Trump agreed to let the Turkish operation go forward and to move US troops out of the way. On Monday, US troops withdrew from posts near two Syrian towns near the border.

The threat of armed resistance from the militia, a force trained and armed by the United States, raises the risks for Turkey as it weighs sending troops into Syria, and for the US, which could find itself on the sidelines of a new front in Syria’s war – this time between two of its allies.

The militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, partnered with the United States to defeat the Islamic State in Syria. Since then, the militia, with American backing, has retained control of a large swath of northeastern Syria.

Turkey considers the militia part of a Kurdish guerrilla movement that threatens Turkey, and Erdogan has demanded a 20-mile-deep buffer zone along the border that Turkey would control to keep back any Kurdish forces.

Speaking by telephone from Syria, Kobani said he had been frustrated by the White House’s announcement on Sunday that the United States would stand aside for a Turkish incursion, and that the lack of clear, predictable policies from Washington had made it hard to plan.

“There should not be any ambiguity,” he said.

There was still confusion on Tuesday about Trump’s new policy.

Trump said Sunday that the United States would not block a Turkish advance. But on Monday he said that he would “obliterate” Turkey’s economy if its military did anything “off limits,” without defining what that meant, and his aides insisted that he had not given a green light to an invasion.

On Tuesday, he said that he had invited Erdogan to visit the White House next month.

Two US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic and military conversations, said that given the apparently contradictory statements by Trump, the Turks seemed flummoxed about what support, if any, they might get from the United States. As a result, they may be rethinking what to do next, the officials said.

Political analysts with knowledge of the plan worked out with US officials said Turkey planned to set up four bases or combat posts in a narrow area along the border, and had agreed to stick to a limited action as a first stage.

“I would expect Turkey to implement a graduated incursion, then go back to negotiation with the US from a stronger position,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“Then when it is in a better situation, do a second operation, and a third, that is a graduated strategy.”

Trump’s argument that pulling US forces from Syria was a fulfillment of his vow to get Americans out of “endless wars” unleashed a wave of criticism, much of it from Republican lawmakers.

Many argued that withdrawing the roughly 1,000 US troops in north-eastern Syria would open a void that could be exploited by President Bashar Assad of Syria or his Russian and Iranian allies, or by the Islamic State.

Trump has not ordered a full withdrawal from Syria. The order on Sunday was only to relocate roughly 100 to 150 troops that had been stationed near the Turkish border. About two dozen were pulled back on Monday.

But analysts feared that Kurdish troops could be redeployed to the northern border against Turkey, taking them away from the battle against the Islamic State. The Islamic State was driven from its last territory in Syria in February, but the SDF, with the support of U.S. Special Operations forces, continue to battle the group’s remnants.

The US officials said the SDF was already beginning to move off some of its counterterrorism missions against the Islamic State.

“The danger of ISIS is real,” Kobani said, adding that it maintains sleeper cells throughout the territory. His forces also oversee prisons and camps holding tens of thousands of former Islamic State fighters and their families, which Trump has said Turkey could take over.

Kobani said there had been no conversations with the United States about handing over these prisoners to Turkey and he called the idea “impossible.”

If Kobani had his way, the United States would remain in Syria until the Islamic State and its remnants are destroyed and the country reached a “complete political solution that guarantees everyone’s rights,” he said.

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