Ankara: Turkey’s operation in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled Afrin region has “de facto” begun with cross-border shelling, Turkish Defence Minister Nurettin Canikli said on Friday.

A Reuters cameraman filmed Turkish artillery at the border village of Sugedigi firing shells on Friday morning into the Afrin region in northwest Syria.

“The operation has actually started de facto with cross-border shelling, except there is no border crossing,” Canikli told broadcaster AHaber. “When I say ‘de facto’, I don’t want it to be misunderstood, it has begun without border crossings.” “All terror networks and elements in northern Syria will be eliminated. There is no other way,” Canikli said.

The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia said Turkish forces fired around 70 shells at Kurdish villages in the Afrin region in a bombardment that began around midnight, describing it as the heaviest such attack since Turkey stepped up threats to take military action against the Kurdish region.

Turkey has said repeatedly this week that an operation to oust the YPG from the Afrin enclave is imminent and has massed troops and armour on the border.

It regards the YPG as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an outlawed rebel goup that has waged a deadly insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984.

The YPG, which also controls a much larger stretch of the border region further east, has vowed to defend the enclave.

Russia has some 300 military observers deployed in Afrin and, on Thursday, Turkey’s army and intelligence chiefs held talks in Moscow that were seen as an essential precursor to any invasion.

On Thursday, the US appeared to be backtracking on its description the planned new security force in northeastern Syria.

US officials had originally described it as a “Border Security Force” that would guard the perimeter of an emerging Kurdish enclave taking shape in northeastern Syria.

Reports of the new force provoked an outcry in Turkey, whose leaders have long accused the United States of enabling terrorism by supporting the Kurds in Syria.

The force “was not properly described,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday after meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Vancouver.

“It’s unfortunate that entire situation has been mis-portrayed, mis-described, some people misspoke,” he said.

“We are not creating a border security force at all.”

Turkey said on Thursday it was not satisfied with Washington’s attempts to allay its concern about the creation of the force adding that its “direct mistrust” of the United States continued.

Meanwhile, mortar fire on a town in northern Syria held by Turkish-backed rebels wounded at least 14 people in a psychiatric hospital, a monitor said on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said the mortar rounds were fired by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed alliance dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Observatory chief Rami Abdul Rahman said most of the wounded were among the more than 100 patients being treated at the hospital, many for post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from Syria’s near seven-year civil war.

Paramedics transferred the wounded patients to a nearby clinic, an AFP correspondent reported. One had lost several fingers.

The mortar fire destroyed a second storey wall of the hospital, showering the beds of the ward with debris.