“Three members of the 50th Division faction of the [Syrian] National Army, loyal to Turkey, were killed and three others remain unaccounted for … following violent clashes after an infiltration operation by the Afrin Liberation Forces (HRE)” in northern Aleppo province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.
It is the latest operation by the HRE after two Turkish-backed Syrian militants of the Levant Front were killed on Friday near Afrin, according to the Observatory.
Afrin is a Kurdish city that was taken over by Turkey and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels in a military operation against Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in 2018. Most of the Kurdish population fled and Turkish authorities resettled displaced Arabs from elsewhere in Syria into their vacated homes.
Turkey considers the YPG - the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) - as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish group that has waged an armed insurgency against the Turkish state for decades in the struggle for greater Kurdish rights and designated a terrorist organization by Ankara.
Syrians rose against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and has left millions more in need of dire humanitarian assistance.
