A bombardment targeted a military checkpoint belonging to Syrian regime forces in Tukhar village in the eastern countryside of Manbij, killing two soldiers and injuring four, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported.
The monitor added that the number of casualties is expected to increase as some of the injured soldiers are in critical condition.
The Syrian government has not commented on the incident yet.
Manbij is a strategically located town at a crossroads connecting Aleppo, Raqqa, and the Kurdish-administered northeast. It is under the control of the Manbij Military Council, a local force affiliated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has several times threatened a military operation against the town that was liberated from the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2016.
Turkey accuses the Syrian Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the SDF, of being the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group struggling for Kurdish rights in Turkey and named a terror group by Ankara. The YPG denies the charge.
The SDF is the main ally of the US-led global coalition against ISIS in Rojava.
