Syria's Bashar Assad not only kills his opponents, but also sends his own troops to their deaths, a Syrian Turkmen brigade representative in Turkey said Wednesday.
"Assad does not only kill people who are against him. He also knowingly sends his own troops to their deaths. Assad forces launched vicious attacks a few days prior to the cease-fire. Nearly 500 regime soldiers were killed in rural Latakia alone over the past week," Sultan Abdulhamid Brigade's Tahsin Hoskar told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday.
Hoskar also said Assad forces left the bodies of their fallen soldiers behind.
"They only take with them the bodies of people who are important to them, and leave the others behind. They don't even have respect for their dead," he said, adding that 160 regime soldiers were killed in Sarraf and Kapikaya fronts in the last 15 days.
"We have their bodies. They include Iranian and Iraqi Shia as well as communications people. Perhaps Russians forced them to launch such an unplanned attack. And they had no choice but to fight to death," he said, adding that they buried tens of bodies themselves in Turkmen Mountain and Jabal al-Akrad, where, he said, the regime attacked intensively until the start of the "cessation-of-hostilities agreement" that went into effect last week.
Noting that the truce did not apply to Turkmen Mountain, Hoskar said the Turkmen "fought an epic fight" against the Assad regime "who wanted to have a strong hand prior to the cease-fire and capture Turkmen Mountain and Jabal al-Akrad".
"The Syrian regime and Russian forces attacked Turkmen Mountain for three days until the evening of Feb. 26. They were perhaps the most intense attacks of the past five years. In short, the dream of a cease-fire in Turkmen Mountain ended before it began," he said.
The cessation-of-hostilities deal reached by Washington and Moscow went into effect Saturday in Syria and was the latest in a series of diplomatic efforts ostensibly aimed at ending the conflict, which will soon enter its sixth year. Since then, there have been several reported breaches.
Daesh and al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate, al-Nusra Front, along with other unspecified groups designated terrorist organizations by the U.N. Security Council, were not included in the agreement.
The 97 armed opposition groups, including the High Negotiations Committee and the Free Syrian Army, announced that they would obey the truce for two weeks.