HAMIMA, Syria (AP) — Syrian government forces entered the outskirts of a northern town Saturday morning after the command of Kurdish-led fighters said it would evacuate the area in an apparent move to avoid conflict.
This came after deadly clashes erupted earlier this month between government troops and the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest. It ended with the evacuation of Kurdish fighters from three neighborhoods taken over by government forces.
An Associated Press reporter saw on Saturday government tanks, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles, including pickup trucks with heavy machine-guns mounted on top of them, rolling toward the town of Deir Hafer from nearby Hamima after bulldozers removed barriers. There was no SDF presence on the edge of the town.
Meanwhile, the Syrian military said Saturday morning its forces were in full control of Deir Hafer, captured the Jarrah airbase east of the town, and were working on removing all mines and explosives. It added that troops would also move toward the nearby town of Maskana.
Over the past two days, more than 11,000 people fled Deir Hafer and Maskana using side roads to reach government-controlled areas after the government annoucned it would launch an offensive to take the two towns.
On Friday night, after government forces started pounding SDF positions in Deir Hafer, the Kurdish-led fighters’ top commander Mazloum Abdi posted on X that his group would withdraw from contested areas in northern Syria. Abdi said SDF fighters would relocate east of the Euphrates River starting 7 a.m. (0400 gmt) Saturday.
The easing of tension came after U.S. military officials visited Deir Hafer on Friday and held talks with SDF officials in the area.
The United States has good relations with both sides and has urged calm.
The SDF’s decision to withdraw from Deir Hafer was made after Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa issued a decree Friday boosting the rights of the country’s Kurds, who made up about 10% of Syria’s population of 23 million before the conflict began in 2011. Over the past decades, Syria’s Kurds had been marginalized and deprived of their cultural rights under the rule of the Baath party that ran Syria for six decades until Bashar Assad’s fall in December 2024.
Al-Sharaa’s decree recognized Kurdish as a national language, along with Arabic, and adopted the Newroz festival, a traditional celebration of spring and renewal marked by Kurds around the region, as an official holiday.
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