QAMISHLI /Syria/, October 26. /TASS/. A Russian military police convoy has patrolled the area along the Syrian-Turkish border near Qamishli, the largest city in northeastern Syria. The total length of the route, which included the nearest border checkpoint, exceeded 200 kilometers roundtrip, commander of the Qamishli-based military police unit Ivan Volgin told reporters.
"Our military servicemen have patrolled the area along the Syrian-Turkish border, the main streets of Qamishli for the first time, heading westwards to the inhabited communities of Amuda and al-Darbasiyah and the village of Matala. We also visited the checkpoint to Turkey, which is located on the northern outskirts of Qamishli. Syrian border guards returned there the other day after a break of seven years. The total length of the route roundtrip is more than 210 kilometers, it took us four hours to cover that distance," he said.
Plans are in store to expand the patrol area, Volgin noted. "It will include the eastern suburbs of Qamishli right up to the inhabited community of Simalka, which is located 130 kilometers away from the city in the direction of Iraq’s Mosul," he said.
On October 9, Turkey launched a military incursion into northern Syria, codenaming it Operation Peace Spring. Ankara claimed that its goal was to clear the border area of what it calls ‘terrorists’ (Turkey’s broad label of the Kurdish forces) and establish a 30-kilometer buffer zone in Syria’s north, where over 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey would resettle. Turkey’s incursion into Syria triggered an outcry in the region and across the world. The Syrian SANA news agency branded the operation as an act of aggression, while the international community condemned Erdogan’s military operation.
On October 22, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a memorandum at a meeting in Sochi on joint actions aimed at resolving the situation in northeastern Syria. The document envisaged that Russian military police and Syrian border guards should enter the Syrian side of the Turkish-Syrian border, outside the area of Operation Peace Spring, to facilitate the removal of YPG units and their weapons to the depth of 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Turkish-Syrian border. Kurdish units were given 150 hours to complete the process.