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Russia, Turkey Reach Deal to Remove Kurdish YPG from Syria Border
(Reuters) Darya Korsunskaya - Russian military police and Syrian border guards will deploy in northeast Syria to remove Kurdish YPG fighters and their weapons from the border with Turkey under a deal agreed on Tuesday. Next week Russian and Turkish forces will jointly patrol a 10-km. strip of land in the "safe zone" that Ankara has sought in northeast Syria. Under the deal with Moscow, the length of border which the YPG would be required to pull back from is more than triple the size of the territory covered by the U.S.-Turkish accord. "The outcome of the Putin-Erdogan meeting in Sochi today indicates that Erdogan has become a master of leveraging the U.S. and Russia against each other to maximize Ankara's gains," said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 300,000 people have been displaced by Turkey's offensive and 120 civilians have been killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sunday. 259 fighters with the Kurdish-led forces had been killed, as well as 196 Turkey-backed Syrian rebels.