2 killed, 11 injured in shelling by Turkish-backed forces in Syria: SDF
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Farhad Shami, the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) Office of Media and Information, said on Wednesday that shelling by Turkish-backed groups a day earlier killed two civilians and injured 15 in the eastern countryside of Syria’s northeast town of Serekaniye (Ras al-Ain).
Turkish-backed militia groups late Tuesday shelled the town of Zirgan, also known as Abu Rasein, about 20 kilometers east of Serekaniye, killing a woman and a child and wounding 15 other civilians.
“The brutal shelling resulted in martyring a woman and a child and injured approximately 15 other civilians,” read an SDF statement.
“The Turkish occupation continues committing war crimes against civilians,” he added.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also reported that one woman and one girl were killed, and 12 people were injured.
Sirwan Kajjo, a journalist for Voice of America, tweeted that “residents are trying to flee the town amid power outage. Some civilians are still stranded in the town.”
“The Turkish army fired at least fifty mortar shells at the town, which led to the destruction of many houses in the western neighborhood,” tweeted northeast Syrian-based journalist Hisham Arafat.
The town of Abu Rasein is held by the SDF in addition to the presence of Syrian regime forces and Russian troops together against the Turkish-backed radical groups which controlled a belt of 150 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep from the towns of Serekaniye to Tal Abyad in northern Syria in an offensive launched in October 2019.
Despite ceasefire agreements between Turkey and Russia, and Turkey and the US in October 2019, Turkish-backed groups and the Turkish army itself continue to target SDF-held areas periodically.
In some cases, villagers living in Syrian-Turkish border areas were killed in attacks by the Turkish military and the rebel forces Ankara supports.
On Sunday, one Assyrian woman was injured in shelling conducted by Turkish-backed groups in the town of Tal Sanan near Tal Tamir.
SDF spokesperson Aram Hanna in a recent Facebook post suggested that the increased Turkish shelling in northern Aleppo and near Tal Tamir in the last few days will hurt the SDF’s fight against ISIS.
"We affirm that such an escalation will definitely affect our efforts to combat terrorism and secure the prisons and the camps that we secure," he said.
He called on Russia to assume its responsibility to stop Turkish ceasefire violations.