The destabilization of northwestern Syria not only involves the Al Qaeda-like Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), but also the Syrian National Army (SNA), the proxy army used by Türkiye as a battering ram against Syria’s Kurds. The SNA has been targeting Kurdish enclaves in northern Aleppo province, Syria, in order to cut them from the Kurdish-run areas in northern Syria, east of the Euphrates River.
“The Syrian National Coalition affirms the right of the Syrian people, with all its components, to regain their country and land after it was stolen by the [Bashar al-] Assad regime and the Iranian militias that support it, as well as the PYD militia,” the SNA-led coalition said in a statement, reported Rudaw, the Kurdish news service based in Erbil, Iraq. The PYD is the dominant Kurdish party—and aligned with the PKK in Türkiye—in the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The PYD militia, also called the People’s Protection Units (YPG), has had a presence in the Kurdish enclaves in and around Aleppo for a number of years and this is what the SNA offensive is intended to eliminate, by driving the YPG back to what the Kurds call Rojava, on the eastern side of the Euphrates.
The SDF, in response to the SNA offensive, issued a call for a general mobilization. “We urge everyone to heed the call for public mobilization and to coordinate closely with the SDF and Internal Security Forces,” the Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement.
