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On Monday a government spokesman said it would will soon clear the town of militants.
"We have cleared an area of 1102 kilometre square from terrorists in Afrin. We will soon reach the town centre and clear it as well," spokesman Bekir Bozdag told reporters.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticised NATO for not supporting his country's ongoing military operation against the the Kurds in Afrin.
Photo: APMore than 200 civilians and 370 YPG fighters have been killed so far, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Some 340 Syrian rebels have also been killed, as well as 42 Turkish soldiers.
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Pro-Kurdish groups held protests in Britain, Germany and other European nations on Sunday, calling on the international community to act. Jamie Janson, a volunteer fighting with the YPG in Afrin, said: "If the world stands by and continues to do nothing, the devastation you are seeing in Eastern Ghouta today will be Afrin city tomorrow."
"For seven weeks now, Afrin has been bombed and shelled without mercy. People don't even wake up when windows rattle from early-morning bomb blasts any more." He is one of three Britons among dozens of international volunteers fighters in Afrin, including Huang Lei from Manchester and Dan Smith, a combat medic.
The Syrian government has stepped up its offence on Ghouta.
Photo: ScreengrabThe latest moves will aggravate tensions between Turkey and the US, which has urged Ankara to halt its offensive against its Kurdish partner forces, their most reliable ally in the fight against Islamic State.
A Western diplomat said Turkey had told its NATO allies that they would stop before the city, planning only to secure the border. "We thought the Afrin offensive was more about Turkey trying to get the US's attention rather that any serious attempt to take territory in Syria," he said.
Syrian ground troops aim at Eastern Ghouta on Monday.
Photo: ScreengrabThe SOHR, which tracks death tolls using a network of contacts inside Syria, published figures new showingt that 511,000 people had been killed in the war since 2011.
About 85 per cent of the dead were civilians killed by the forces of the Syrian government and its Russian patron. The onslaught continued on Monday in Eastern Ghouta, where some 1100 have been killed in three weeks.
US Ambassador to United Nations Nikki Haley warned that Washington "remains prepared to act if we must," if the UN Security Council failed to act on Syria.
Telegraph, London