the driver fled his cab, lucky to be alive, as the fireball killed this man. the attacker, emad al swealmeen, taking the secrets of his motivation with him. but now, in an official document disclosed after a bbc challenge, revelations of the lies he told to cling on to life in the uk. and this is what he claimed to be fleeing in 2014 syria s civil war. the only problem with that? he wasn t syrian. the 32 year old was, in fact, from baghdad in neighbouring iraq. he had been living in the united arab emirates for 1h years. the home office spotted he was a liar, and an immigration judge backed that decision in april 2015. in the ruling now made public, the judge said al swealmeen s account was not credible. he couldn t describe areas of the country he said he knew, and didn t even speak like a syrian. that ruling gave the home office permission to fly him
syrian/turkish border, taking over multiple cities. once this has actually happened, turkey says it s going to create a safe zone that syrian refugees living in turkey can be moved back into. that would effectively be creating a significant change in the demographic there, not to mention another more pressing concern. that is that those syrian kurds, that syrian kurdish fighting force, they have been guarding isis fighters in prisons, both foreign fighters as well as syrians and iraqis. they have been guarding refugee camps, home to 70,000 people among the last to leave the isis caliphate, that last stronghold they were holding. in these camps, i was just there, the isis ideology is very much alive. this is the same fighting force that is on the front hines of the still ongoing battle against
turkey today began a military offensive in northern syria, provoking worries of a massacre in the region and also stirring rare republican condemnation of president trump. the president s decision to order u.s. troops out of northern syria cleared the way for this turkish military operation. it is against kurdish forces, who have been a critical u.s. ally. turkey bombed two cities in northern syria. you can see here turkish fighter jets roaring through the skies. syrian democratic forces in the region say there have already been civilian casualties. they are pleading with the united states and other allies to impose a no-fly zone. arwa, hard to get information from this region anyway, especially early in such an operation. but what are we hearing? reporter: well, as you mentioned there the operation
has begun. it was announced over twitter by the turkish president. our clarissa ward was reporting on streams of civilians evacuating one of those areas that was being targeted. we re already hearing about civilian casualties. turkey has an objective that it believes it needs to fulfill because turkey believes from turkey s perspective the syrian kurdish fighting force the ypg, those key u.s. allies, pose an existential threat to turkey. turkey considers them to be a terrorist group. they are in effect the sister organization of the pkk that turkey has been battling for decades now. turkey has these lofty ambitions, though. it s unclear exactly how it s going to carry them out. to push in about 18 miles along hundreds of miles of stretch of syrian/turri syrian/t