Turkey is ready to take over security in the Kurdish-controlled Syrian city of Manbij, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday.

Erdogan’s office says the president spoke to U.S. President Donald Trump by telephone Sunday, days after an Islamic State attack in the city killed 19 people, including three U.S. service members and an American military contractor.

Erdogan told Trump the attack was a “provocation” aimed at affecting his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria.

The White House did not specifically mention Erdogan’s comments about Manbij other than saying the two presidents “agreed to continue to pursue a negotiated solution for northeast Syria that achieves our respective security concerns.”

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and its Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Unit (YPG), control Manbij.

Turkey says the YPG is linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting a long separatist war for more Kurdish autonomy inside Turkey.

Turkey considers both the YPG and PKK terrorist groups. The Kurdish militia fears Turkey will carry out a military assault on it as soon as the U.S. pulls out.

Trump has proposed a safe zone in the region but has yet to provide any details.

Turkey does not want any Kurdish-controlled territory on its border and has said any safe zone must be cleared of Kurds.

White House bureau chief Steve Herman contributed to this report.

 
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Lamia al-Gailani, an Iraqi archaeologist who lent her expertise to rebuilding the National Museum’s collection after it was looted in 2003, has died at age 80.

 

Her daughter, Noorah al-Gailani, said Sunday that her mother died Friday in Amman, Jordan. She didn’t give a cause of death.

A devotee of Iraq’s heritage and its museums, al-Gailani selected artifacts to display at the reopening of the National Museum in Bagdad in 2015, more than a decade after it was looted in the wake of the U.S. invasion.

 

The restored collection included hundreds of cylinder seals, which had been used to print cuneiform impressions and pictographic lore onto documents and surfaces in ancient Mesopotamia, now present-day Iraq. The seals were the subject of al-Gailani’s 1977 dissertation at the University of London.

 

“She was very keen to communicate on the popular level and make archaeology accessible to ordinary people,” said her daughter, who is curator of the Islamic civilizations collection at the Glasgow Museum in Scotland.

 

Al-Gailani also championed a new museum for antiquities in the city of Basra, which opened in 2016.

 

But she bore the grief of watching her country’s rich archaeological sites suffer looting and destruction in the years after the U.S. invasion. Thousands of items are still missing from National Museum’s collection.

 

“I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up,” she told the BBC in 2015, when Islamic State militants bulldozed relics at the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud near present-day Mosul.

 

Born in Baghdad in 1938, al-Gailani was one of the first Iraqi women to excavate in her country.

 

Fresh from her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in Britain, al-Gailani was hired as a curator at the National Museum in 1960, her daughter said. It was al-Gailani’s first job in archaeology.

 

She returned to Britain in 1970 to pursue advanced studies, and she made her home there. Still, she kept returning to her native country, connecting foreign academics with an Iraqi archaeological community that was struggling under the isolation of Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule and the U.N. sanctions against him.

 

In 1999, she published “The First Arabs,” in Arabic, with the Iraqi archaeologist Salim al-Alusi, on the earliest traces of Arab culture in Mesopotamia, in the 6th through 9th centuries.

 

She would bring copies of the book with her to Baghdad and sell them through a vendor on Mutanabbi Street, the literary heart of the capital, her daughter said.

 

After the U.S. invasion, al-Gailani continued to travel to Iraq, determined to rescue its heritage even as the country convulsed with war.

 

At the time of her death, she was working with the Basra Museum to curate a new exhibit set to open in March, said Qahtan al-Abeed, the museum director.

 

“She hand-picked the cylinder seals to display at the museum,” said al-Abeed.

 

A ceremony will be held for al-Gailani at the National Museum on Monday. She is survived by her three daughters.

 

 
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Turkish prosecutors are seeking a life sentence for a local employee of the United States consulate in Istanbul accused of attempting to overthrow the government and espionage.

A 78-page indictment seen by The Associated Press on Sunday against Turkish national Metin Topuz, jailed since October 2017, said he was in “very intense contact” with police officers who led a 2013 anti-corruption investigation that implicated top government officials.

 

The Turkish government accused U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for attempting a “judicial coup” with that investigation and labeled his network a terror group. Gulen is also blamed for the 2016 failed coup but he denies the accusations.

 

The indictment said Topuz, who worked as a translator and fixer for the Drug Enforcement Agency in the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, told authorities he had been in touch with several police officers with alleged links to Gulen for narcotic investigations.

 

The prosecutor said this was a “reflexive acknowledgment of his crimes” and claimed Topuz’s communication with the officers was “beyond the limits of consular work.”

 

The indictment includes telephone calls, text messages, CCTV frame grabs with suspected police officers, along with testimonies from four witnesses and two suspects.

He’s also accused of privacy violations and illegally recording personal data.

 

A call to Topuz’s lawyer on Sunday was not immediately returned.

 

A judge will decide whether the case will proceed to trial. Among the 30 complainants are Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and former ministers.

 

Topuz’s arrest increased tensions between the two NATO allies in 2017 and led to the suspension of bilateral visa services for more than two months.

 

Relations hit rock bottom last summer when U.S. President Donald Trump sanctioned two Turkish officials and increased tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, causing a huge loss in the Turkish lira’s value, to pressure the country to release an imprisoned American pastor. Pastor Andrew Brunson was convicted in October for terror links but later allowed to leave the country.

 

Two other local consular employees are under investigation in Turkey. Jailed translator Hamza Ulucay is accused of terror group membership with alleged links to outlawed Kurdish militants, and staff Mete Canturk was placed under house arrest.

 

Ties have been on the mend since, but a host of issues remain as irritants, including U.S. support for Kurdish militants in Syria Turkey considers terrorists, Turkey’s pledge to buy Russian missile defense systems and cleric Gulen’s continued residence in Pennsylvania.

 

The Turkish government launched a massive crackdown against Gulen’s network following the 2016 coup and arrested more than 77,000 people and sacked more than 130,000 public employees through emergency decrees. Critics say the purge went beyond the suspects of the coup with the arrest of journalists, lawmakers and activists.

 

 
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Lebanon used an Arab economic summit on Sunday to call for the return of Syrian refugees to safe areas of their war-torn country, where the nearly eight-year civil war is still underway despite a recent series of government victories.

President Michel Aoun told the opening session that Lebanon is overwhelmed by the presence of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, who make about half the population of the tiny country, which is struggling with an economic crisis.

The meeting is the first economic and development summit to be held since 2013, and comes as Syria, Yemen and Libya remain gripped by violence and Iraq confronts a massive reconstruction challenge after its costly victory over the Islamic State group.

Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said nearly half of all refugees “come from our Arab world.”

Qatar’s ruler attended the summit, which has been marred by divisions over readmitting Syria to the Arab League. But Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani arrived shortly before the summit and left minutes after it began.

Qatar has been one of the main backers of Syrian insurgents trying to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have reopened their embassies in Damascus, and the visit by Qatar’s ruler is widely seen as a first step to restoring relations with Syria.

Sheikh Tamim and the president of Mauritania were the only heads of state from the 22-member Arab League who came to Beirut to attend the summit. Other countries sent lower-level delegations.

The other leaders’ absence appeared to be a snub to Lebanon, where groups led by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah had insisted that Assad should be invited.

“We regret the absences of some brotherly kings and presidents who have their justified excuses,” Aoun said without elaborating.

“We call for a safe return of Syrian refugees to their country, especially to stable areas that can be reached and areas of low levels of violence,” Aoun said in his opening address. “This should not be linked to reaching a political solution.”

Lebanon is home to some 1 million Syrian refugees, or a quarter of the country’s population.
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A bombing in the Syrian capital Sunday targeted a military checkpoint on a main highway during rush hour, state media reported.

There was no immediate word on casualties from the blast in the southern neighborhood of Qazaz, near the highway leading into central Damascus. State TV gave few details about the explosion, which happened on the first working day of the week, but said it appeared to have been “a terrorist act.”

State news agency SANA said the blast targeted a military checkpoint in the area, adding that nearby roads were closed. It added that a second attack in the same area was thwarted by security forces.

However, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the French news agency that the blast targeted a military intelligence department and left a number of dead and wounded.

“The explosion took place near a security branch in the south of the city. There are some people killed and injured, but we could not verify the toll immediately,” the war monitor told AFP.

It was unclear if the blast was caused by a bomb that was planted or a suicide attack, according to the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.

It said that shooting followed the explosion. 

Attacks have been rare in Damascus since Syrian government forces captured the last rebel-held neighborhoods and suburbs of the capital last year.

Bombings had left hundreds dead over the course of the nearly eight-year civil war.
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