Reports: Children among the dead after Syrian rebels clash in Turkish-held Afrin

May 29, 2020

Fighting among Turkey-backed Syrian rebel groups in the Turkish-controlled city of Afrin in northern Syria left several civilians dead Thursday, including two children, according to war monitors. 

Fierce clashes between the Hamzat Division and the Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam factions erupted Thursday, said the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Three civilians, including two children, were killed in the gunfire, the monitoring group said. 

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote on Twitter that the fighting started after a group of fighters from the Hamzat Division walked into a shop run by a man displaced from Syria’s southwestern Ghouta region. 

“They asked to purchase something for 300 lira [$0.16] on credit. The owner of the shop refused. In response, the Hamzat shot up the place tossed a grenade, killing the shop owner and his son,” she wrote. 

Afrin has been in the hands of Syrian fighters trained and equipped by Turkey since March 2018, when the Free Syrian Army captured the city from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, which Turkey considers an offshoot of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party.