Syrian and Turkish forces on Monday exchanged fire in another deadly clash in northwest Syria, where nearly 700,000 people have fled escalating violence in the last major opposition bastion.
Turkey, which backs Syrian rebel factions, said that five of its soldiers were killed by Syrian regime fire in Idlib Province, adding that it “neutralized” 101 Syrian soldiers in response.
It was not possible to verify the claim and neither Syrian state media nor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, immediately reported casualties among Syrian army ranks.
The exchange was the second in eight days and took place in the area of Taftanaz, where Turkey recently sent in troops, the Britain-based observatory said.
Regime shelling a week earlier killed eight Turkish soldiers, prompting a deadly response by the Turkish army.
The clashes are further straining relations between Damascus and Ankara, while also increasing tensions between Russia and Turkey — the conflict’s chief foreign protagonists.
Syrian government forces backed by Moscow have pressed a blistering assault against the last major rebel bastion in Syria’s northwest for more than two months.
Violence in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo has displaced 689,000 people, said David Swanson, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“The number of people being displaced in this crisis is now spiraling out of control,” he told reporters on Monday.
The exodus is one of the largest of the nine-year civil war and risks creating one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the conflict.
It has sparked alarm from Turkey, which already hosts about 3.7 million Syrian refugees and fears another influx.
The Turkish Ministry of National Defense said that the troops targeted on Monday had been sent “as reinforcement to the region with an aim to prevent clashes in Idlib, ensure our border security, and stop migration and human tragedy.”
The ministry warned that Ankara would respond “in the strongest possible way” to any new attack.
In a sign of growing tensions, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday night convened a meeting in Ankara of Cabinet ministers, the army chief of staff and the country’s intelligence chief to review the situation in Idlib, local media reported.
Since Friday last week, large convoys of vehicles carrying commandos, tanks and artillery pieces have reinforced 12 Turkish military posts in Idlib, installed by Ankara under a 2018 deal with Russia to stave off a regime offensive.
However, the agreement has failed to stop the government’s advance, with Turkey saying that regime forces have surrounded three of its outposts.
Fahrettin Altun, Erdogan’s top press aide, wrote on Twitter that “Turkey retaliated against the attack to destroy all enemy targets and [avenge] our fallen troops.”
Erdogan has given Damascus until the end of the month to retreat from its outposts and urged Russia to convince the regime to halt its offensive.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS