The Asayish patrol was attacked on Monday midnight in a hit-and-run attack by unknown gunmen armed with machineguns in Hamir Labidah village, 15 kilometers south of Manbij city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor said.
Four Asayish members were killed in the attack, the monitor said.
The attack comes amid a surge in hostilities in territories controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria, with Turkish-backed Arab fighters launching attacks on Kurdish-controlled villages in Manbij and Arab tribal fighters clashing with the SDF in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province and northeast Syria’s (Rojava) Hasaka province.
On Monday, the SDF’s Manbij Military Council thwarted an attack by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army near the village of Arab Hassan, killing five fighters and injuring 15.
Turkey has long viewed strategic Manbij, located at a crossroads connecting Aleppo, Raqqa, and the Kurdish-administered northeast, as a key zone to launch its next military operation in northern Syria to seize it from Kurdish forces. Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labeled the city and Tal Rifaat as Ankara’s next targets in order to complete its long-desired 30-kilometer “safe zone” along its southern border.
Turkey accuses the Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the SDF, of being the Syrian front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group struggling for Kurdish rights in Turkey and named a terror group by Ankara. The YPG denies this charge.
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