A week-old cease-fire in a key city in northern Syria between rival Kurdish and Turkish-backed fighters has been extended for a few more days as American and foreign officials try to broker a lasting armistice in the area, a U.S. official said.
Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said the pause in hostilities in the Arab-majority city of Manbij, about 20 miles south of the Turkish border, would last “into the end of this week.” Speaking in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Miller did not give an exact day for when the cease-fire would end, or say whether it might be extended again.
“We do not believe it is in the interest of any party to see increased conflict in Syria,” Mr. Miller said. He added, “we are trying to work on a path forward that de-escalates tensions.”
Manbij has long been a flashpoint in the civil war in Syria — and the Islamic State tried to take advantage of the chaos it created there.
As part of its self-declared caliphate that seized large areas of territory in Syria and Iraq, ISIS took control of Manbij in 2014. Two years later, and with American assistance, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces liberated Manbij as part of a rout of the Islamic State in northern Syria.
But the city later became a focus of Syrian factions battling for control in the region. Last week, the Kurdish forces agreed to withdraw under a cease-fire deal with the Turkish-backed fighters known as the Syrian National Army.
The initial agreement was struck on Dec. 10 with the help of American negotiators. It required the Syrian Democratic Forces to not only withdraw from Manbij, but also to pull back to the eastern side of the nearby Euphrates River. The river was a dividing line between the Kurdish fighters and their Turkish-backed rivals under a tenuous 2019 agreement brokered by the Trump administration.
For years, the Kurdish-led soldiers have been America’s most reliable partner in Syria, liberating cities seized by the Islamic State and detaining around 9,000 of its fighters. Around 900 American troops are mostly based in northeast Syria to prevent the extremist group from rising again.
But Turkey has long seen the Kurdish forces as an enemy. The Turkish government says the Kurdish fighters in Syria are allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has fought the Turkish state for decades and is considered a terrorist group by Turkey and the United States.
American officials hope the Kurds’ withdrawal from Manbij will ease tensions with the Turkish-backed fighters who, in recent days, have attacked Kurdish positions around Kobani, east of the Euphrates River, according to Kurdish military officials, activists and Syria analysts. Kobani is a Kurdish-majority city on the Turkish border, and holds enormous emotional significance for the Kurdish fighters who reclaimed it from the Islamic State in 2016 after a monthslong siege.
On Tuesday, as the extended cease-fire was announced in Washington, the Kurds’ top military commander in Syria said his forces were willing to create a demilitarized zone in Kobani supervised by American troops.
“This initiative aims to address Turkey’s security concerns and ensure lasting stability in the region,” Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish military commander, said on the social media platform X.
But it is not clear if President-elect Donald J. Trump will agree, given that he sought to withdraw American soldiers from Syria during his first administration and changed his mind only after the resignation of some of his most senior military and diplomatic advisers.
Mr. Miller, the State Department spokesman, said the Biden administration was talking to Turkey about the tensions in Kobani and elsewhere in northern Syria but declined to give specifics.
“It’s a very challenging issue,” Mr. Miller said. “There are longstanding tensions between Turkey and these groups. And so it is not an easy path forward, but it is certainly one that we’re pursuing.”
The post A Cease-Fire Is Extended in a Disputed City in Northern Syria appeared first on New York Times.
