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Kurdish YPG, Assad regime clash in Hasakeh

When asked about Russia, Cook said Washington would also do the same with the Russian jest, which have been striking Daesh targets in Syria at the Syrian government’s request since previous year.

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Regime aircraft flew over the city on Sunday morning but without carrying out further raids, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Kurdish forces have expanded their control of the city despite the bombing of several locations by Syrian jets.

“This is quite a significant development because the Kurds now seem to be determined to drive government troops out of the city and control it”, said Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Gaziantep, near the Turkey-Syria border.

The YPG, a critical part of the USA -backed campaign against Islamic State, controls swathes of northern Syria where Kurdish groups have established autonomy from Damascus since the start of the Syria war in 2011.

The Russians were said to have also backed the Kurdish fighters in their push against the IS, but the Kurdish groups didn’t disclose that, or admit receiving such support from Russia.

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 official told AFP that the powerful Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian forces would withdraw from Hasakeh, while the police forces of both the Kurds and the government would remain. That was denied in a leafleting campaign that said the YPG meant to take control.

However, the YPG denied it agreed to any truce and instead made announcements through leaflets and loudspeakers across Hasakah, asking army personnel and pro-government militias to surrender or be killed. “We call on you to give up your weapons or count yourselves dead”.

Syrian government planes bombed Kurdish positions in Hasakeh last week as the struggle for predominance in the city escalated.

The news agreement also includes opening all blocked routes in Hasakah city by the Kurdish fighters, who have mounted a wide-scale offensive recently to push the government out of Hasakah, a city that has largely become controlled by the Kurds. Russian efforts to end the clashes through mediation are ongoing as are the clashes, Rudaw, the English language online daily published from Kurdistan, reported.

Thousands of civilians in the ethnically mixed city, including members of the Christian community, have fled to villages in the countryside as the fighting intensified, residents said.

The leader of the newly declared “Jarablus military council”, set up with the aim of mounting its own campaign to seize Jarablus with SDF support, was assassinated on Monday, the Observatory said.

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The fighting appears to have undone tacit understandings between the YPG and the Syrian army that had kept Hasakeh relatively calm during the past five-year conflict.

Al-Qamishli city in Al Hasakah Governorate northeastern Syria