Kurds say Turkish drone attack killed several in Syria

The US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in a statement on Monday that the Turkish drone strike in the village of al-Mistriha killed 12 civilians, including six children.

This is while the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of fatalities at eleven, noting they were all members of the same family.

Meanwhile, Turkish-backed militants from the so-called Syrian National Army have launched an offensive against US-backed SDF in the northern Syrian city of Manbij.

Turkish security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, asserted on Monday that “control of Manbij has been secured”, without providing further details.

Ankara-backed militants were deployed to northeastern Syria in October 2019 after Turkish military forces launched a long-threatened cross-border invasion in a declared attempt to push members of the US-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militant group away from border areas.

Ankara views the YPG as a terrorist organization tied to the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been seeking an autonomous Kurdish region in Turkey since 1984.

Militant groups, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), announced on Sunday that they had fully captured the Syrian capital Damascus, and confirmed reports of the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Assad’s fall came less than two weeks after the HTS-led militants waged a surprise two-pronged attack on Syria’s Aleppo and the countryside around Idlib before taking control of a number of cities, including Damascus.