The YPG, the Syrian wing of the PKK terrorist group, has stepped up its attacks in the country’s north over the past few days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor reported Monday, with 11 people, including civilians, killed in the fresh round of violence.
“A woman, her two children and a man were killed in the bombing of a military position,” the Britain-based monitor said. It said seven opposition army members were also killed in that incident. YPG members forces infiltrated the opposition forces’ military position and killed three fighters, said the monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
The terrorist group also booby-trapped a military position as they withdrew, in an attack that killed another four opposition forces members but also four civilians including a woman and her two children, the Observatory said. On Sunday, 15 opposition forces fighters were killed after the PKK/YPG infiltrated their territory, the monitor reported earlier.
The YPG is supported by the U.S. militarily under the guise of the fight against another terrorist group, Daesh. Turkish cross-border offensives pushed the group to its current bastions in northeastern Syria but they occasionally attack towns and military positions of the Syrian opposition army backed by Türkiye in its offensives against the YPG.
The incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will reconsider the U.S. Central Command’s (CENTCOM) ties with the PKK/YPG, according to a former NATO commander.
Washington’s support for the PKK/YPG has rattled Turkish-American ties for years. The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Türkiye, the United States and the European Union, launched a bloody campaign of terrorism in the 1980s, targeting Turkish security forces and civilians, primarily in the southeastern Türkiye, close to the border with Iraq. More than 40,000 people were killed in the acts of terrorism, while the PKK leadership retains a swath of territory in Iraq’s north, where they have hideouts. In Syria, it occupies oil-rich regions.
“Given the integrity of the transition (Trump’s presidency), I suspect that all of these areas have the potential to cause genuine friction, as they should, and they could potentially escalate from competition to crisis to conflict,” said Gen. Tod D. Wolters, who served in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. European Command (EUCOM) until his retirement in 2022.
Wolters would support a new Trump administration’s comprehensive revision of its “close relationship” with the PKK/YPG, he told Anadolu Agency (AA) after a Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK) meeting in Istanbul on Tuesday.
“I don’t know what the outcome would be but I know CENTCOM sees in regards to the PKK/YPG, where the U.S. stands, where CENTCOM stands and what kind of dialogue there must be between Türkiye, NATO and USEUCOM when it intervenes,” Wolters said.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently said Ankara could mount a new offensive against the PKK/YPG in northern Syria to create new safe zones along its border, after saying that he would discuss a possible U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria with Trump.