The Kurdish forces, violating the truce, entered the Ghwairan neighborhood in the northeastern Syrian city, which sparked new clashes between the two sides. On Tuesday Hasaka’s remaining government officials were confined to a few buildings in the city centre while the rest of the city was under Kurdish control, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Director Rami Abdulrahman said.
Advertisement
The YPG is at the heart of a USA -led campaign against the Islamic State militant group in Syria and controls swaths of the north, where Kurdish groups associated with the militia have set up their own government since the Syrian war began in 2011. YPG-controlled areas of northern Syria include an uninterrupted 400 km (250 mile) stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border from the frontier with Iraq to the Euphrates river, and a pocket of territory in northwestern Syria called Afrin.
Syria has been gripped by civil war since March 2011 with various terrorist groups, including Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL), now controlling parts of it.
Moscow offered to help negotiate a communication mechanism to prevent incidents between Syrian and USA air forces, Russian media reported Tuesday.
Efforts will continue be made to resolve the Kurdish issue, said the report, adding that roads will be opened inside Hasakah and Qamishli city toward the military positions in and outside the city.
The three point agreement calls for a “halt to all hostilities and the return to regime forces of any positions seized by Kurdish fighters” since Wednesday, according to the military source.
“The increase of Syrian Air Force’s sorties is fraught with incidents, as the Syrians have no such link with the Americans, as the Russian military”, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported.
The deal also stipulated that casualties would be transferred north to Qamishli.
The truce between the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) and the Syrian army came into effect at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
Thousands of civilians in the city, which is a mix of Arabs and Kurds, including members of the Christian community, have fled to villages in the countryside as the fighting intensified, residents said.
The fighting in Hasaka, which was divided into zones of Kurdish and Syrian government control, marks the most violent confrontation between the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian army in more than five years of civil war.
Advertisement
Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the Central Intelligence Agency in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.
