ShareBEIRUT: More than 100 combatants were killed over the last two days in northern Syria in fighting between Turkish-backed groups and Syrian Kurdish forces, a war monitor said on Sunday. Since Friday evening, clashes in several villages around the city of Manbij have left 101 dead, including 85 members of pro-Turkish groups and 16 from the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
In a statement, the SDF said it had repelled “all the attacks from Turkey’s mercenaries supported by Turkish drones and aviation”. Turkish-backed factions in northern Syria resumed their fight with the SDF at the same time Islamist-led rebels were launching an offensive on November 27 that overthrew Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad just 11 days later.
They succeeded in capturing the cities of Manbij and Tal Rifaat in northern Aleppo province from the SDF. The fighting has continued since, with heavy casualties.
According to Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Observatory, the Turkish-backed groups aim to take the cities of Kobane and Tabqa, before moving on to Raqqa. The SDF controls vast areas of Syria’s northeast and parts of Deir Ezzor province in the east where the Kurds created an autonomous administration following the withdrawal of government forces during the civil war that began in 2011.
The group, which receives US backing, took control of much of its current territory, including Raqqa, after capturing it from the jihadists of the Islamic State group. Ankara considers the SDF an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long insurgency in southeastern Turkey and is banned as a terrorist organization by the government.
The Turkish military regularly launches strikes against Kurdish fighters in Syria and neighboring Iraq, accusing them of being PKK-linked. Ahmed Al-Sharaa, Syria’s new leader and the head of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), has previously said the SDF would be integrated into the country’s future army. HTS led the coalition of rebel groups that overthrew Assad last month.
Meanwhile, hundreds protested in Lebanon’s second city Tripoli on Sunday, demanding that authorities release Islamists detained during the civil war in neighboring Syria, an AFP journalist said. The prisoners include Lebanese who had gone to fight with rebels and jihadists against the forces of longtime ruler Bashar Al-Assad during the conflict, which began in 2011, and were arrested upon their return to Lebanon. The rally in Tripoli’s Nour Square comes nearly a month after Islamist-led forces toppled Assad.
“We want to increase pressure on the Lebanese authorities to release all Islamist detainees,” said protester Ahmad Al-Shimali. “Islamist detainees in Lebanon’s prisons were arrested in the context of the Syrian revolution,” he said of the more than 13-year civil war.
“Most went to Syria to fight, supported our people in Syria, or were found to have communicated with jihadists or fighters,” Shimali added. “But today the Assad regime has fallen.”
Rights campaigners have long demanded fair trials for those accused of ties to Islamist extremism in Lebanon, some of whom have been behind bars for years without a trial.
In late December, Prime Minister Najib Mikati told relatives of the detainees that the issue should be “definitively” resolved, but also said parliament must first decide on whether to issue a general amnesty. Parts of Tripoli saw clashes in the early days of the war in Syria, which was triggered by the Assad government’s repression of democracy protests. Tensions had been simmering for years between the city’s Sunni Muslim district of Bab Al-Tebbaneh and nearby Jabal Mohsen, where the majority of residents are from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Assad belongs. —AFP
