More than 100 fighters have been killed in the last 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.
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Since Friday evening, fighting in villages around the town of Manbij has left 101 dead, 85 members of the pro-Turkish Syrian factions and 16 of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, dominated by the Kurds), the director of the OSDH, Rami Abdel Rahmane, told AFP.
In a statement, the FDS claimed to have pushed back “ all attacks by Turkey’s mercenaries supported by Turkish drones and aircraft “. Pro-Turkish factions resumed their attacks against the FDS, just as Islamist rebel groups launched their offensive against the president’s forces on November 27. Bashar al-Assad, driven from power eleven days later. They took the towns of Manbij and Tal Rifaat, in the north of Aleppo province, from the FDS and the fighting has continued since then, with heavy human tolls.
The cities of Kobané and Tabaqa threatened?
According to Rami Abdel Rahmane, the objective of the pro-Turks is to then take the cities of Kobané and Tabaqa, then that of Raqqa and ultimately drive the FDS from the territories under their control. 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.
Neighboring Turkey views the SDF as an extension of its sworn enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK, Turkish Kurdish). And its army regularly targets Kurdish fighters in Syria and neighboring Iraq.
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Syria’s new leader, head of the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmad al-Chareh, has said the SDF should be integrated into the future Syrian army. The HTS group led the coalition of rebel groups which announced on December 8, after entering Damascus, the fall of Assad who fled to Moscow. This coalition controls most of the country.