Turkey rebuffs U.S. calls for truce in Syria, demands Kurdish fighters disarm

ISTANBUL - Turkey rebuffed U.S. calls for a cease-fire in northeastern Syria as it pressed ahead Wednesday with an offensive targeting Syrian Kurdish militants and demanded that the fighters lay down their arms.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Kurdish fighters should "drop their weapons" and withdraw from designated border areas by nightfall to halt the fighting. Turkey launched the offensive last week to rout Kurdish-led forces it says pose a threat to Turkish national security.

Erdogan rejected a U.S. offer to broker a truce, saying in a speech before parliament Wednesday that Turkey had "never in its history sat down at a table with terrorist groups."

Turkish officials view Syrian Kurdish forces as terrorists for their links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has waged a decades-long war for autonomy in Turkey.

Despite a U.S. proposal to mediate, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the conflict was "between Turkey and Syria."

"It's not between Turkey and Syria and the United States," he said in remarks from the Oval Office. "They've got to work it out."

[Trump: U.S. has no stake in Turkey’s fight in northern Syria]

Trump this week announced sanctions on senior Turkish officials, including the defense minister, over what the White House said were "destabilizing actions" in northeastern Syria. He also ordered the final withdrawal of about 1,000 U.S. troops allied with Kurdish-led fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in the fight against the Islamic State.

The abrupt pullout of U.S. troops prompted Syrian Kurdish leaders to strike a deal with Syrian President Bashar Assad and his main backer, Russia, to help forestall the Turkish campaign.

"They're no angels. They're no angels. Go back and take a look," Trump said of the Kurds. He added that their forces would be fine because "they know how to fight."

Trump made the remarks as Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepared to depart Wednesday evening for Turkey, part of the administration's efforts to quell the chaos unleashed by the Turkish offensive, which critics warned would create a security vacuum.

In an interview on Fox Business Network, Pompeo said he expected to hold face-to-face meetings with Erdogan and other Turkish officials.

"He needs to stop the incursion into Syria," Pompeo said of the Turkish president. "We need a cease-fire, at which point we can begin to put this all back together again."

Erdogan said that Turkey and allied Syrian rebels would forge ahead with plans to a establish a buffer zone some 20 miles into Syria.

"Nobody can stop us," he said.

In response to a question later at a White House news conference with visiting Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Trump said, "If Russia is going to help in protecting the Kurds, that's a good thing, not a bad thing." He called Turkey's Syrian offensive a "semi-complicated problem . . . that we have under control" and repeated his determination to "bring our great soldiers back home" in keeping with a 2016 campaign promise.

Trump said that "some people," notably the "military-industrial complex," wanted him to keep U.S. forces in Syria because "they do very well" financially from continuous warfare. But he repeated that America must stop "fighting endless wars."

Trump denied giving Turkey " a green light" to invade northern Syria and took aim at one of the chief Republican critics of his Syria policy, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.. "Lindsey would like to stay in the Middle East for years," he said, adding that the senator, who had emerged as one of his strongest supporters, should focus on his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Graham said earlier on Twitter, "The statements by President Trump about Turkey's invasion being of no concern to us also completely undercut Vice President (Mike) Pence and Sec. (Mike) Pompeo's ability to end the conflict."

In Syria, meanwhile, U.S. troops continue to take precautionary measures that suggest that completely withdrawing from northern Syria is going to take more time and that their safety is still uncertain.

On Tuesday, advancing fighters aligned with the Turkish government prompted the U.S. military to dispatch F-15 jets and Apache helicopters near the town of Ain Issa in a show of force designed to disperse the fighters, a U.S. defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

The coalition fighting the Islamic State has transferred about 50 alleged Islamic State prisoners from Syria to Iraq over the past week, according to intelligence officials in Iraq.

"It's the top 50," an official from the U.S.-led coalition said. The location to which the prisoners have been moved, and who has custody of them, remained unclear Wednesday.

Officials in Baghdad said they have told the U.S. and European governments that they are willing to accept Syria's Islamic State prisoners for a fee. "The offer is still there, but we haven't received any response," an Iraqi intelligence official said. Iraq is already imprisoning at least 17,000 men and women for terrorism offenses, according to judicial records. Human rights monitors and recently released detainees say that conditions are deteriorating rapidly, and that hundreds of prisoners have died because of neglect.

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The Washington Post’s Louisa Loveluck in Irbil, Iraq, Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Kareem Fahim in Istanbul and Dan Lamothe, Felicia Sonmez and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.