Syria: fighting between Kurdish and pro-Turkish groups, more than 100 dead in two days

More than 100 fighters have been killed over the past two days in clashes in northern Syria between armed factions supported by Turkey and Syrian Kurdish forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) said on Sunday.

Since Friday evening, fighting in villages around the town of Manbij has left 101 dead, including 85 members of pro-Turkish Syrian groups and 16 of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, dominated by the Kurds), the NGO said. The Turkish Ministry of Defense, for its part, said on Sunday X to have “neutralized» 32 fighters of the «PKK/YPG» in northern Syria.

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the US-backed SDF, are seen by Ankara as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and regularly carry out strikes against Kurdish fighters in Syria and in Iraq.

Pro-Turkish factions resumed their attacks against the FDS in Syria, just as a coalition of rebel groups led by radical Islamists launched an offensive on November 27 against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, ousted from power eleven days later .

Pro-Turkish groups captured the towns of Manbij and Tal Rifaat, in the north of Aleppo province, from the SDF. And the fighting has continued since then with heavy human tolls. According to Rami Abdel Rahmane, director of the OSDH, the objective of the pro-Turkish groups is to then take the towns of Kobani and Tabaqa, then that of Raqqa.

The SDF controls large areas of the northeast and part of the province of Deir Ezzor (east), where the Kurds installed an autonomous administration after the withdrawal of forces from power at the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011. Syria’s new leader, leader of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmad al-Charaa, said the SDF should be integrated into the future Syrian army.