Turkish army soldiers stationed on the border with Dirbesîyê have opened fire on people in the autonomous region of Northern and Eastern Syria. Four civilians were injured, including a child.
Turkish state troops stationed on the border with the city of Dirbêsiyê in Northern and Eastern Syria have attacked civilians. ANHA news agency said that four people were injured in the incident. A nine-year-old child was said to be among the victims. He was taken to a hospital in Hesekê with serious injuries.
The Turkish border guards opened fire indiscriminately on residents of Dirbêsiyê with heavy machine guns on Sunday night. The three other injured people were a 29-year-old woman and two young men aged 18 and 30. It was unclear whether the four were related to each other.
Dirbêsiyê is located directly opposite the town of almost the same name, Dirbêsî (tr. Şenyurt), south of Qoser (Kızıltepe) in the northern Kurdish province of Mardin (Mêrdîn). The region is a small reflection of divided Kurdistan. Binxet and Serxet are a case in point. Binxet, or “below the line,” is used to describe Kurdish areas in Syria near the Turkish border. The Kurdish areas located on Turkish territory in close proximity to the Syrian border are referred to as Serxet, which means “above the line”. After the end of the First World War, the French mandate territory of today's Syria was separated from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s. The border with today's Turkey runs along the railway line in this area. This meant that entire cities were separated, including Dirbêsiyê and Dirbêsî, but also Qamishlo and Nisêbîn.
Repeated attacks from border guards
Outposts of the Turkish army repeatedly attack villages and towns along the border strip between Turkish territory and the autonomous region of Northern and Eastern Syria. In addition to the civilian population, positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and checkpoints of the Syrian regime's forces are also targeted. Eighty percent of the infrastructure in Northern and Eastern Syria was destroyed by the Turkish army in October during extensive bombings from the ground and from the air. Almost fifty people were killed in the attacks and dozens more suffered injuries, some of them serious.
