ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Syria’s opposition militants are preventing 15,000 people from leaving Shahba area in Aleppo province days after they took control of the area from Kurdish forces, a senior official from the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria (Rojava) told Rudaw English on Thursday.
“We sent two buses [to Shahba] yesterday but the gangs affiliated with Turkey - Hamzat and Sultan Murad - are preventing them [people] from leaving,” said Sheikhmous Ahmed, head of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) office for the displaced and refugees.
The militants’ refusal to let people leave has trapped 15,000 people in the area, which also includes the strategic town of Tal Rifaat, according to Ahmed.
Turkey-backed opposition militants launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northwestern region of Shahba. Both sides reached an unannounced deal to allow the safe movement of people to other Kurdish-held areas, mainly Tabqa in Raqqa province.
Most of these people hail from the Kurdish city of Afrin which was controlled by the same militia groups and Ankara in 2018.
On Tuesday, Ahmed told Rudaw English that about 100,000 people had left Shahba for Tabqa. He said on Thursday that the number has not increased, adding that the number of people stuck total 6,000 families.
Shahba co-chair Mohammed Shekho, who managed to flee to Kurdish-held areas, told local media that the people who are stuck in Shahba have been subjected to “mass killing,” stressing that the militants have imposed a curfew and banned all means of communication.
The displaced people are hosted in makeshift camps, schools and mosques.
SDF said in a statement on Thursday that the opposition militants have "launched a large-scale kidnapping and enslavement campaign against civilians besieged in the Shahba’a region," adding that the groups had obstructed "previously agreed-upon civilian evacuation" earlier in the week.
"Over 120 vehicles carrying hundreds of civilians, who were attempting to evacuate to areas in north and eastern Syria, were abducted and taken to an unknown destination near the Sheikh Najjar area," it noted.
Tal Rifaat was a longtime target of Turkey who sought to seize the strategic town from Kurdish forces on the grounds that the forces are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) - which has been at war with Ankara for decades.
Updated at 5:02 pm with SDF statement
