Turkish forces are seen at Mount Barsaya in northeast of Afrin, January 28, 2018 / Khalil Ashawi / Reuters
On February 8, four fighters of the Manbij Military Council, a faction of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), were wounded in an attack by the Turkish military, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The London-based monitoring group said that the fighters were wounded when the Turkish military targeted a military position of the SDF near the village of Tukhar, to the east of Manbij in the northern Aleppo countryside, with an anti-tank guided missile. Some of the fighters were critically wounded, with one of them losing a hand.
The Turkish missile strike came amid ongoing large-scale humanitarian operations in different parts of the northern Aleppo countryside after the February 6 earthquake that claimed the lives of more than 3,100 people in Syria, and 9,000 in Turkey. The natural disaster forced a de-facto ceasefire across Syria.
A day earlier, Kurdish forces shelled Turkish-occupied areas near the town of Marea in the northern Aleppo countryside. The Turkish strike may have been a response to the shelling, which didn’t cause any losses.
The Turkish military and the SDF have been exchanging blows in northern and eastern Syria for a few months now. Ankara threatened the group, which was backed by the United States, with a new ground operation on several occasions. Even the deadly earthquake was not apparently enough to force the two sides to de-escalate.
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