The Turkish military has launched several air strikes in northern Syria that have killed at least 12 soldiers, both from Kurdish forces and from pro-regime movements, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The attacks come days after Turkey blamed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for the attack that killed six people in central Istanbul on Sunday.
“The time has come for reckoning. The bastards will be held accountable for their treacherous attacks,” the Turkish defense ministry tweeted early Sunday along with an image of a plane taking off for a night operation.
“Nests of terror are razed by precision strikes,” he added in another Twitter message along with a video showing him locking onto a target, which explodes soon after.
The ministry did not provide details of the operation or specify its location, but Kurdish forces reported air strikes by Kurdish forces against several cities in northern Syria, including Kobane (northeast).
“Kobane, the city that defeated the Islamic State, has been bombed by the Turkish occupation air force,” Farhad Shami, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an allied PKK in Syria, warned on Twitter.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), Turkish shelling targeted SDF positions in the provinces of Aleppo (north), where Kobane is located, and Hasaka (northeast), its director told AFP Rami Abdel Rahman.
The Turkish military also shelled positions of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime forces in Raqqa and Hasaka governorates, he added.
In all, according to the OSDH, the shelling killed six Kurdish SDF members and six regime soldiers.
Turkey considers the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the main component of the SDF – an extension of the banned PKK.
Both the PKK and YPG have denied their involvement in the Istanbul attack.
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu directly accused the YPG of being responsible for the attack, saying that “the order for the attack was given from Kobane”.
This Kurdish-majority Syrian city near the Turkish border was captured by the Islamic State jihadist group in late 2014. Kurdish fighters ousted the group early the following year.
On Friday, the US State Department expressed fears of “possible military action by Turkey” and advised its citizens not to travel to northern Syria and Iraq.
lar-jos/pvh/jj/sag/dbh/ll
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gruponacion/IL7NHAQXPNFMTOD6SV75RZWXJA.png "Turkey launches airstrikes in Syria after Istanbul attack")
