Arab21 News reported on Friday, July 3, that the Syrian regime is cooperating with the PKK terrorist organization in order to carry out several terrorist attacks, including political assassinations, particularly in Istanbul and Ankara, following the debate on a likely military operation to be undertaken in northern Syria.
According to the report, two leaked documents that mention the contact were disclosed just after the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) tightened security measures and sent reinforcements to Kilis on the Syria border in this week. In one of the documents belonging to a Syrian intelligence service of the regime, it says that the Syrian Minister of Defense, Fahd Jassem al-Freij and President Bashar Assad's special security adviser, Major Gen. Ali Mamlouk, met with a PKK senior leader on June 17 in Syria's northeastern Qamishli province.
While it is alleged that all parties compromised on the plan for Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah to be deployed to the Malikiyah region and then be led to Tal Abyad and Aleppo, the document says: "Minister of Defense Gen. Fahd Jassem al-Freij approved all the PKK's requests and expanded their control over the province of Hasaka, and promised full support and management of their affairs absolutely."
The other document is a message sent from the 330th division of the regime's army to the director of the General Intelligence Directorate, indicating that an internal intelligence source revealed that 17 militants from the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) crossed into Syria to be trained in bombing, assassination and kidnapping important and influential Turkish figures in operations in Istanbul and Ankara.
The document says: "They are still in the training camps of the People's Protection Units [YPG], shuttling between the village of Tal Marouf and the town of Qahtaniyah, knowing that their training lasts 30 days and then they are sent back to their home countries to work in depth against Turkey."
Previously in March, it was claimed according to the intelligence that Assad would release almost 1,000 imprisoned criminals who have been trained over the course of a year with the purpose of using them in the civil war to carry out a planned attack on Turkey, which is seen as an enemy by the regime due to its persistent support of the Free Syrian Army as a component that has been fighting against the regime for the past four years.
When it comes to the association between Assad and the DHKP-C, it is known that the regime harbors militants linked to the organization by giving and guarding a building in Latakia, Syria, for training under the supervision of Mihraç Ural, a top militant from the Turkish People's Liberation Party-Front (THKP-C), a predecessor of the DHKP-C, and the alleged mastermind behind the car bombings that took place in Hatay in 2013.
Following operations that the Greek government conducted after a deal between the then-prime minister and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the then-Greek President Antonis Samaras to strengthen cooperation in the fight against terrorism in 2013, the organization had suffered a major blow and moved its center from Greece to Latakia, one of the strongholds of the Syrian regime. The city's district of Ras al-Bassit purportedly has a DHKP-C militant camp protected by the Syrian army. While the military base was also assigned to a group called the Urgent Ones (Acilciler) led by Ural, DHKP-C militants in the camp were being trained in explosives and bomb-making by military officers from the Syrian army.Additionally, Ural's name also was mentioned when Prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz was killed in his office at the Istanbul Çağlayan Courthouse on Tuesday, March 31 by two terrorists from the DHKP-C. On his Twitter account, Ural tweeted about Kiraz's murder on March 31, saying: "If you contaminate justice, then you'll bear the consequences."
