
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – On Thursday 21 Kurdish civilians were killed in the Aleppo neighbourhood of Sheikh Maksud when Syrian forced shelled an area near the Marouf mosque.
Dozens of others were injured in the attack and a number of homes were destroyed.
This has been the biggest attack on the country’s Kurdish population since the beginning of the anti-government revolution in Syria a year and a half ago.
Activists said the Syrian forces attacked Sheikh Maksud to target a large number of Syrian opposition members and civilians who have taken refuge in the relative safety of the Kurdish populated sector.
“This neighbourhood hasn’t seen any clashes between the pro-Assad forces and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters since the beginning of the revolution,” an activist from Aleppo who preferred to stay anonymous, told Rudaw on Friday. “The regime wants to punish the Kurdish residents for receiving the anti-Assad families who fled their homes due to the mass arrests and the summary executions committed by the pro-Assad’s forces in different neighbourhoods in Aleppo.”
This activist said the attack seems to be a message from the Assad regime to the Kurds not to harbour those who flee the rest of Syria, otherwise “no fighters from the FSA were witnessed by the residents of the neighbourhood of Sheikh Maksud.”
Following the attack, thousands of Kurds gathered in front of the hospital and accompanied the bodies of the victims to the Kerdagh area in the Kurdish city of Efrin, northwest of Aleppo for burial.
Kurdish political activists as well as members of the Kurdish National Council (KNC) and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) attended the funeral, which later turned into large demonstrations against the Syrian regime.
In a statement released on Friday, leaders of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) said, “The Syrian regime will pay dearly for this massacre in Sheikh Maksud.”
“The YPG will not forget the blood of those citizens who lost their lives in the massacre and the units will conduct revenge and counterattacks,” read the statement.
Kurds in Syria haven’t joined the revolution and since July they have run most Kurdish cities where Syrian security and armed forces withdrew voluntarily.
http://www.rudaw.net/english/news/syria/5175.html