Six civilians lost their lives in Syria’s Kurdish-held northeast on Monday due to Turkish air strikes, according to a war monitor and local media. The strikes occurred as Ankara launched operations in Iraq and Syria following deadly attacks on its soldiers.
Turkey declared a fresh round of air strikes on Saturday in response to two distinct attacks on its bases in northern Iraq, claiming the lives of 12 soldiers. Ankara attributed the attacks to Kurdish militants.
‘Six civilians have been killed in separate Turkish air strikes,’ said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The leader of the Britain-based monitoring group, equipped with a network of sources within Syria, revealed that four of the casualties were workers from a printing press in the northern city of Qamishli, situated near the Turkish border.
‘A strike on a mill near Qamishli killed a civilian, while another was killed in a gas storage facility,’ he added.
About a dozen targets were struck in the operation, with all of them being facilities operated by the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration, as observed by the monitor and AFP correspondents on the ground.
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Syrian Kurdish news agency ANHA verified the death toll, reporting six casualties, with four of them occurring at the printing press. The agency also noted six additional individuals were injured.
Strikes against oil sites near the Turkish border were reported on Saturday evening by both an AFP correspondent and the Observatory, with no victims mentioned.
After an attack in Ankara wounded two security personnel in October, Turkey heightened air strikes in Syria’s northeast.
The first bombing to strike the Turkish capital since 2016 was claimed by a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group classified as a terrorist organization by Ankara and its Western allies.
In 2019, the battle to oust Islamic State group fighters from their final strongholds in Syria was led by the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey perceives the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, which hold sway over the SDF, as an extension of the PKK.
Turkey has undertaken a sequence of ground operations since 2016 to eliminate Kurdish forces from the northern Syrian border areas.
Since its inception in 2011 with a harsh crackdown on anti-government protests, the conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of over half a million people, evolving into a devastating war involving foreign armies and jihadists.