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Forces loyal to the al-Qaeda-led government in Damascus (HTS) have traded fire with the Kurdish military in the northeast of Syria for the second time in a week.
The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were attacked yesterday morning near the town of Darnaj, in the eastern Deir Ezzor Governate. Without saying whether they were acting on behalf of Damascus, Kurdish officials said they held the central government fully responsible.
On August 19th, WaL reported that HTS had amassed some 50,000 soldiers for a potential attack on the Kurdish territories in the country’s northeast. The muster came off the back of several failed attempts to implement a March agreement between the SDF leader and the Syrian president that would have seen the SDF disarm and become part of the national Syrian army, an outcome that both Washington and Turkish officials have pushed for.
However, following massacres of virtually every single religious and ethnic minority present in the country, the SDF backed out of the commitment to disarm, while the government in Damascus, made up of the official al-Qaeda affiliate during the Syrian conflicts and led by a former ‘Emir’ of ISIS and member of al-Qaeda in Iraq, said they would undertake no further negotiations with the Kurds while the SDF was under arms.
“On Wednesday, the SDF and government forces traded shelling in the Aleppo Governorate, leaving two civilians killed and three wounded on the outskirts of Maskanah,” Antiwar News reported.
In spring, along with an interim constitution, the HTS government announced a cabinet that excluded any Kurdish members, and by August elections, suspended voting in the Kurdish regions, suggesting concurrently that they will have almost no parliamentary representation, Antiwar continued.
At the moment, the 50,000 troops amassed at Palmyra have made no further headlines, even as other minorities continue to come under extreme persecution. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Fighters of the Kurdish SDF. PC: Al-Ain, archive
