Oct. 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Last week, the armed jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), the former Al Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria, took control of the city of Afrin, in northern Syria, until then controlled by pro-Turkish militias.
HTS troops and other allied groups of the Syrian National Army (ENS) such as the Al Hamza Division or the Sultan Suleimán Shá Division arrived in Afrin on Thursday and attacked the Third Legion, also a member of the ENS, according to the director of the Observatory Syrian for Human Rights, Rami Abdulrahman, speaking to Iraqi-Kurdish television Rudaw.
Abdulrahman has assured that the jihadist militiamen now control the city and that it is unknown how this situation will be articulated with the presence of the interim government authorities supported by Turkey.
An expert on Syrian armed groups, Hamam Issa, told Rudaw that the jihadists are negotiating with local authorities “the en bloc handover of the administration of Afrin and its surroundings to the interim government.”
Afrin was a city with a Kurdish majority that was taken over by the Kurdish militias of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) after the start of the Syrian civil war, in 2011, but the intervention of Turkish military forces in 2018 led to the departure of the YPG along with hundreds of thousands of Kurds, so they are no longer the majority population in the area.
