Turkish warplanes said to kill 40 pro-government fighters in Syria

Fighting has intensified in the region in the past few days, as Turkey has sent reinforcements to press its offensive against towns held by Kurdish groups.

Just a day earlier, eight Turkish soldiers were killed, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said in a statement, and more were wounded.

Soldiers loyal to President Bashar Assad of Syria had entered Afrin, a Kurdish stronghold, last week to support the Kurdish militia known as the YPG.

Turkey and its allied Syrian rebel fighters say the YPG is the focus of their operation, which began in January. That has put them at odds with forces loyal to Assad.

Saturday’s airstrike hit a camp in Kafr Jina, according to a spokesman for YPG forces in the area and a Kurdish reporter on the ground.

The reporter, Firhad Shami, who was in Kafr Jina, said that at least 40 fighters were killed in the airstrikes, though the exact number could not be confirmed.

“We managed to pull out 23 bodies. The rest are still in the bunker; the Kurdish Red Crescent couldn’t pull them all because of the shelling,” he said in a message.

It was the third time in 48 hours that Turkish warplanes had struck pro-government forces in Afrin.

By Saturday evening, the Syrian state news agency Sana had not confirmed that any pro-government forces had been killed in the region, only civilians who had died in an earlier strike.

“Forces of the Turkish regime and its mercenaries of the terrorist groups on Friday night targeted the Afrin area with all types of weapons, leaving 20 civilians martyred or injured,” Sana reported, calling the attack a “violation” of a new U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire.

Despite that, clashes have continued in Afrin and in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta where Syrian government forces are conducting airstrikes on residential neighborhoods, home to 400,000 civilians.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed alliance, said in a statement that Turkish airstrikes had targeted positions held by the Syrian army’s “popular forces.”

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of Turkey said Saturday that his country’s forces had captured the strategically important town of Rajo from Kurdish forces.

“Afrin is surrounded,” Yildirim said, according to local news outlet Hurriyet. “We have cleared all nearby border areas of terror nests.”

Turkey views the YPG’s forces as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group that has fought a decadeslong insurgency in Turkey. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Turkey. But the YPG has been an important ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Turkish warplanes said to kill 40 pro-government fighters in Syria

Fighting has intensified in the region in the past few days, as Turkey has sent reinforcements to press its offensive against towns held by Kurdish groups.

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