Turkey’s military has launched a new series of air strikes on Kurdish-run parts of northeast Syria over the past week amid an ongoing ground and air campaign in northern Iraq, targeting the armed rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Hasakah-based pro-Kurdish news agency ANHA reported on Saturday.
At least four artillery shells from the Turkish side of the border bombed Kurdish-majority Syrian city of Kobani on Friday. Two civilians were wounded, according to local reports.
Soldiers of the Syrian army were also targeted by the Turkish army in the village of Zor Maghar, 30 kilometres west of Kobani. Syrian official news agency SANA announced that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and US soldiers held a joint military exercise in the rural area of Hasakah in the northeast of the country.
U.S support for the SDF has long been opposed by Turkey, who considers the organisation as extensions of the outlawed PKK. Both Turkey and the United Sates label the PKK a terrorist organisation, but Washington has worked over the years to distance its Syrian Kurdish allies from the group.
On Wednesday, a Turkish drone strike killed the co-commander of the US-backed militia forces in Kobani and two other female fighters from the Kurdish-led Women’s Protection Units (YPJ).
The Turkish forces launched four other drone strikes on the Syrian side of the border within the past ten days, targeting facilities used by local security forces, spokesman for the Kurdish-led forces Farhad Shami told Al-Monitor.
Ankara says that the offensive in northern Iraq, dubbed Operation Claw-Lock is a pre-emptive measure to prevent the PKK from using Iraq as a base to carry out attacks in Turkey.
Ahval