Kurds announce deal with Damascus on Syria troop deployment near Turkish border

The Kurdish administration in northern Syria on Sunday announced a deal with the Damascus government on a Syrian troop deployment near the border with Turkey to confront Ankara's offensive.

"In order to prevent and confront this aggression, an agreement has been reached with the Syrian government... so that the Syrian army can deploy along the Syrian-Turkish border to assist the (Kurdish-led) Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)," it said in a statement on its Facebook page.

The Kurdish administration did not give further details on the agreement or say if it would compromise Kurdish self-rule in the north.

But the announcement came after Syria's state news agency SANA said the army was sending troops to the north to "confront the Turkish aggression".

Marginalised for decades, Syria's minority Kurds carved out a de facto autonomous region across some 30 percent of the nation's territory after the devastating war broke out in 2011.

When the Islamic State jihadist group swept across the region in 2014, the Kurd-led SDF mounted a fierce defence of their heartland and became the US-led coalition's main partner on the ground.

The Kurds feel they have been betrayed by their once formidable ally, the United States, and left to fend for themselves in the battle against Turkish forces.

In an opinion piece published Sunday in Foreign Policy, SDF chief Mazlum Abdi said the United States had an "important role in achieving a political solution for Syria".

"We... are not asking for American soldiers to be in combat... We are sure that Washington has sufficient leverage to mediate a sustainable peace between us and Turkey."