A Bayraktar Akıncı combat drone. Source: the Turkish Ministry of National Defense.
Late on July 28, a Turkish combat drone carried out a strike against a training camp of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near the town of Khirbat Khwi in the northern countryside of Syria’s al-Hasakah.
In a statement, the SDF acknowledged that four of its fighters were killed in the drone strike. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based pro-opposition monitoring group, said that at least eight other fighters of the group were also wounded.
This was the second Turkish drone strike to target the SDF in less than 24 hours. On July 27, a strike destroyed two vehicles of the group between the towns of Khaznah and Tell Marouf in the northeastern countryside of al-Hasakah, killing three fighters and wounding two others.
In an apparent response to the recent Turkish drone strikes, SDF fighters raided two military positions near the Turkish-occupied town of Kaljibrin in the northern Aleppo countryside early on July 29.
Five militants of the 50th Division, a faction of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, were killed during the raid. The Turkish military and its proxies retaliated with a series of artillery strikes that targeted SDF positions in the northern Aleppo countryside.
Turkey escalated its artillery and drone strikes on SDF territory in northern and eastern Syria in recent months, killing or wounding dozens of the group’s fighters and officials.
The recent strikes came amid reports of a near meeting between the foreign ministers of Turkey and Syria to discuss the ongoing normalization process. Ankara hopes that an agreement with Damascus will grant it more freedom to pursue the SDF and its affiliate in the war-torn country.
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