QAMISHLI (AFP) – Kurds protested on Sunday in the Syrian city of Qamishli against Turkish cross-border strikes targeting Kurdish militants in the country’s northeast, an AFP photojournalist said.
One week ago Turkey began a barrage of air strikes against the semi-autonomous Kurdish zones in north and northeastern Syria, and across the border in Iraq.
It has also threatened a ground offensive in those areas of Syria.
The strikes came after a November 13 bombing in Istanbul that killed six people and wounded 81 and that Ankara blamed on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it and its Western allies consider a terrorist group.
The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. Turkey says Kurdish militnats are the PKK’s allies.
Kurdish groups denied any involvement in the Ankara blast.
Demonstrators in Kurdish-controlled Qamishli in Hasakeh province on Sunday brandished photos of people killed during the last strikes in the semi-autonomous region, the AFP photojournalist said.
They carried Kurdish flags alongside photos of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan -- jailed in Turkey since 1999.
The Turkish raids have killed at least 58, most of them Kurdish militants, according to the Britain-based so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has an extensive network of sources in Syria.
Turkey’s military has conducted three offensives against militants since 2016 and already captured territory in northern Syria.
U.S.-supported so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are now the Kurds’ de facto army in the area.
Ankara views the YPG, which controls swathes of Syria’s northern border region, as a terrorist organization tied to the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has been seeking an autonomous Kurdish region in Turkey since 1984.