A regime source in the city told Agence France Presse that the air strikes were “a message to the Kurds that they should stop this sort of demand that constitutes an affront to national sovereignty”.
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Kurdish fighters now control 90 percent of the city after seizing the central prison, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday.
The incident Monday in the air above Hasakah, an area held by Syrian Kurdish forces battling ISIS, appears to be the closest military encounter yet between American and Syrian government forces in the two years since US jets began flying over Syria as part of a USA -led coalition’s fight against ISIS.
The close encounter highlights how crowded the airspace and battlefield have become in the five-year-old civil war in Syria, where both US and Russian forces are launching strikes with competing interests. Turkey claimed to have been assured by the United States the Kurds would immediately withdraw from the mostly Arab city after expelling ISIS.
YPG-controlled areas of northern Syria include an uninterrupted 400 km 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.
Rami Abdulrahman, Observatory director, said the fighting began after pro-government militiamen detained Kurdish youths, a step that had followed advances by Kurdish security forces towards government-held areas. The US at that point made it clear through the Russians that the US would “take whatever action is necessary” to defend US forces on the ground if the strikes continued.
Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said it was easy for the Syrian government to avoid bombing large bases, but far more risky to strike areas close to YPG forces being trained by US forces.
The YPG appeared intent on leaving a nominal Syrian government presence confined to within a security zone in the heart of the city, where several key government buildings are located, Kurdish sources said.
Saying the U.S. will do what is needed to protect coalition forces, Davis added, “The Syrian regime would be well advised not to do things that would place them at risk”.
“We view instances that place coalition personnel at risk with the utmost seriousness, and we do have the inherent right of self-defense when USA forces are at risk”, he added.
In light of regime airstrikes targeting the YPG close to nearby US troops, the Pentagon (headquarters of the US Department of Defense) warned the Assad regime Friday to not attack near US forces, The Wall Street Journal reports.
In a follow on incident Friday, two U.S. F-22s intercepted Syrian aircraft “which attempted to transit the area and were met by coalition aircraft”, Karns said.
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Karns said that no weapons were fired by coalition fighter jets. The Syrian aircraft departed the area before the USA fighters arrived, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters last Friday. “They were very positive about that”, a YPG commander said.
