At least 11 fighters from a Syrian militant group based in Ankara were killed Sunday in rare Russian airstrikes in an area controlled by Turkey and its Syrian allies in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“Eleven Hamza fighters were killed and thirteen others were wounded in Russian air strikes in the village of Brad in the Afrin province,” the NGO said.Remaining Time-0:00FullscreenMute
The raids hit a school used as a guerrilla base and training camp, destroying part of it.
Attempts were made yesterday to retrieve survivors or bodies trapped in the wreckage, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Russian warplanes have launched ten airstrikes since Saturday in the area around Afrin, the director of the NGO, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP, describing the raids as “rare” in the area.
“Russia’s message is clear, it wants to put pressure on the Turks (…) and ensure that there are no borders or red lines” in their military operations in Syria, a spokesman for the so-called “National Army” told AFP. an alliance of guerrilla organizations close to Ankara, calling the Russian PA raids a “crime”.
Moscow, a key ally of the Syrian regime, and Ankara, which supports rebel groups, are major players in the Syrian war and concluded a ceasefire in 2020 in the northwestern province of Idlib, which remains almost completely out of its control. Of Damascus.
In the province of Aleppo, the Kurdish area of Afrin was occupied in March 2018 by the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian aides, who expelled the main Kurdish paramilitary organization from it.
This area, like all rebel-held areas adjacent to Turkey, is often rocked by targeted killings, attacks or explosions, which Ankara generally attributes to Kurdish fighters.
The war in Syria, which erupted in 2011 sparking the crackdown on democratization protests, has claimed the lives of some half a million people and turned millions more into internally displaced persons or refugees.
