Dozens of U.S. military vehicles carrying assistance to the PKK’s Syrian offshoot YPG-dominated SDF arrived in northeastern Syria on Sunday, according to video footage shared on Twitter.
The trucks carrying military assistance, including the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle used by the U.K. Special Forces, were seen in the footage allegedly obtained in Qamishli, Syria.
NOW Dozens of #American military vehicles arrives to #NESyria from #Kurdistan region of #Iraq, in additional support for #SDF pic.twitter.com/bOW3jxowde
— MOHAMMED HASSAN (@MHJournalist) February 14, 2021
They were shipped from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)-controlled area of northern Iraq.
The news came as 13 Turkish citizens were brutally executed by PKK terrorists in a cave in Gara, northern Iraq.
The U.S. has primarily partnered with the YPG in northeastern Syria in the anti-Daesh fight. On the other hand, Turkey strongly opposed the terrorist group’s presence in northern Syria, which has been a major sticking point in strained Turkey-U.S. relations. Ankara has long objected to the U.S.' support for the YPG, a group that poses a threat to Turkey and terrorizes local people, destroying their homes and forcing them to flee.
Under the pretext of fighting Daesh, the U.S. has provided military training and given truckloads of military support to the YPG, despite its NATO ally’s security concerns. While underlining that a country cannot support one terrorist group to fight another, Turkey conducted its own counterterrorism operations, over the course of which it has managed to remove a significant number of terrorists from the region.
Turkey has aimed to prevent the YPG from establishing a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria, which would border Turkey and connect the so-called northwestern Afrin canton to the so-called Kobani (Ain al-Arab) and Jazeera cantons in the northeast. Ankara describes this as a “terror corridor” posing a grave security threat to its national security, underlining its possible impact on the PKK’s activity within Turkish borders.
Locals in YPG-controlled areas have long suffered from its atrocities. The terrorist organization has a lengthy record of human rights abuses, ranging from kidnappings of suspected persons, recruiting child soldiers, torture, ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in Syria.
Also, the YPG's use of child soldiers has been repeatedly documented and criticized by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW). The group reportedly tricks parents into giving up their children or outright kidnaps them, taking them to training camps where they are denied contact with their families.
Most recently, the YPG has detained at least 100 civilians this month to forcibly recruit them in areas under its control in eastern Syria, according to local sources.
YPG terrorists continued to forcibly recruit civilians by separating them from their families in the eastern Deir el-Zour province, where a large Arab population resides. Terrorists rounded up more than 100 civilians, who previously participated in protests against the terror group, from their homes and at checkpoints in various regions of Deir el-Zour.
Most of the detainees were forcibly recruited by the terror group, while some of them were exposed to torture, the sources said. Last month, the YPG terrorist organization forcibly recruited 52 young men in the same province.
The PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, has waged a terror campaign against Turkey for more than four decades and has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, including women and children. The YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK terror group.
