GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th October, 2019) The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) will be part of a joint security mechanism together with the Syrian army under a deal with Damascus and therefore will not need to withdraw from the territories in northern Syria that they have been controlling so far, Ahmad Suleiman, political bureau member of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party (KDPP), told Sputnik.
On Sunday, the de facto Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) announced in a statement on social media that it had reached an agreement with Damascus that foresaw the deployment of the Syrian troops along the entire borderline with Turkey to counter the latter's incursion.
"The agreement has not been officially announced by both sides [the SDF and the Syrian government] or the Russian side, which leads the negotiations between the two parties, but the agreement is a military [one], and it revolves around the joint mechanisms to prevent Turkey from continuing its aggression on the eastern part of the Euphrates River," Suleiman said.
He added that the SDF would be part of the Syrian defense system.
"The SDF will be part of the Syrian defense system that does not need to withdraw, but will depend on the nature of the deployment of the Syrian army," he said.
The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party is independent from the SDF, but it has been directly engaged in the talks with Damascus. Suleiman confirmed to Sputnik that he and party leader Hamid Darwish had had meetings with Syrian top officials in an attempt to "reach an understanding within the framework on how to remove aggression from the entire region and ensure the safe implementation of the military agreement."
As one of the oldest Kurdish parties in Syria, the KDPP allied in different periods with the Democratic Union Party, which Turkish leadership calls a terrorist group and fights against in the ongoing Operation Peace Spring.
On Monday evening, the Syrian army entered the city of Manbij in the north of the country, which was earlier held by the NES, Syrian state tv reported.
The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation also announced late on Monday that a number of settlements in the provinces of Aleppo, Raqqa and Hasakah had announced the restoration of Syrian sovereignty on their territory because of the inability of the NES to protect the population and solve humanitarian problems.
