Syria
A Turkish army jet fighter escorts the plane of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he arrives at the new airport in Istanbul, Saturday, September 22, 2018. Photo: AP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - At least 20 Kurdish internal security forces (Asayish) were killed on Monday when a Turkish airstrike targeted a training center in Derik (al-Malikiyah) countryside in northeast Syria, a war monitor reported.
“As a result of the aerial bombardment by a Turkish warplane on an Asayish training camp in Hasaka countryside … 20 were killed and about 50 wounded,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based war monitor.
The death toll is expected to rise as many of the wounded are in critical condition, the monitor said.
Turkey has relentlessly bombarded Kurdish sites in northeast Syria since Thursday, striking military targets and civilian infrastructure, including power stations, oil fields, and other basic services in Rojava. This follows a suicide attack against Turkey’s interior ministry in Ankara last week, which the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) later claimed responsibility for.
Mazloum Abdi, the general commander of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has denied any connection between Rojava and the Ankara attack. The “perpetrators have not passed through our region as Turkish officials claim, and we are not party to Turkey’s internal conflict nor we encourage escalation,” he said in a Wednesday statement on X.
Abdi accused Turkey of looking for an excuse to launch a new attack on Rojava and urged the international community to prevent any violence, especially Russia and the United States who are guarantors of a 2019 ceasefire deal that ended a Turkish offensive into northeast Syria.
Turkey regards the People’s Protection Units (YPG) - the backbone of the SDF - as the Syrian front for the PKK, a Kurdish group that has waged an armed insurgency against the Turkish state for decades and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara.
On Sunday, the SDF announced that they had killed six Turkish soldiers in northern Syria over the past three days in retaliation to the Turkish targeting of Rojava over the past week. The Kurdish-led force on Friday said that at least 15 people, including eight civilians, were killed by the strikes.
Thousands of people across Rojava held protests against the Turkish attacks, calling on the international community to impose a no-fly zone over the Kurdish enclave.
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