“The Afrin Liberation Forces [HRE] carried out an infiltration operation on military positions belonging to the [Syrian] National Army factions loyal to Turkey on the axes of Anab and Maryamin in Afrin countryside, northwest of Aleppo,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based war monitor.
Five Turkish-backed militants were killed in the clashes that ensued, 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.
The HRE occasionally carries out hit-and-run attacks on Turkish-backed forces in Afrin.
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.
