Turkey kills nine civilians in Syrian Kurdistan: YPG

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – Kurdish forces in Syria said a Turkish Army cross-border attack on Monday night killed nine civilians.

In a Tuesday press release on its website, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) announced that Turkish troops “indiscriminately” fired on civilians in the village of Kuheyla near the border town of Tel Abyad.

The YPG revealed six of the victims were children, and the other three were women.

“Our forces nearby managed to free four civilians who were under fire by the enemy,” read the YPG press release adding the Turkish Army did not give a chance to evacuate the bodies of the killed.

There was no confirmation or report of any attack in the Kurdish-held Syrian territory by the Turkish General Chief of Staff as of the time of publishing this report.

However, a brief note on the Turkish Army website said, “An unarmed and unequipped terrorist member of the PKK/PYD who was trying to illegally enter Turkey from Syria was captured.”

Turkey considers the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the ruling party in Syrian Kurdistan, and its YPG military wing to be extensions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The outlawed PKK has been waging a decades-long guerrilla war against Turkish troops for Kurdish rights.

Kurdish forces also accused the Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) of shelling the village of Shera in the self-declared Afrin Canton in northwest Syria.

The YPG is the main ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

Another report of an attack on Kurdish-held territory, this time by IS, came from the village of Qadiriya south of the Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates River, said the YPG without providing further details.

A month ago, Turkish airstrikes and artillery shelling killed 24 civilians, six of them children, in the village of Suraysat, south of Jarablus, according to a mid-September Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.

Jarablus is a border town that Turkey and its Syrian FSA allies captured from IS on Aug. 24 in an ongoing operation dubbed the “Euphrates Shield.”

The operation was aimed at containing Kurdish territorial expansion between Kobani and Afrin cantons.

The attack on the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) also killed between 10 and 15 fighters, the HRW noted.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany