ANSD : Syria Kurds outraged over mutilated body of female fighter

SAT 20 - 4 - 2024

Date: Feb 3, 2018
Source: The Daily Star

Syria Kurds outraged over mutilated body of female fighter

_{Agence France Presse}
BEIRUT: Syria's Kurds Friday accused Turkey-backed rebels fighting them of mutilating then filming the body of one of their female fighters after a video appeared of her corpse.

Turkey and allied Syrian rebels have since Jan. 20 pressed an offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria, whose Kurdish fighters Ankara views as "terrorists".

A Kurdish official identified the young woman as Barin Kobani, who took part in a U.S.-backed campaign to drive Daesh (ISIS) from the northern town of Kobane.

The Kurds in a statement blamed the "terrorist allies of the enemy Turkish state" for mutilating the body of Kobani, who was a member of the all-female Kurdish Women's Protection Units (YPG).

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said it received the video from a Syrian rebel fighting with Turkish forces in the Afrin offensive.

The rebel told the Observatory the footage was filmed on Tuesday after rebels found the young woman's corpse in the village of Qurna near the Turkish border in the north of the enclave.

In the footage, a dozen men, some armed, gather around the badly mutilated body of a woman lying on the ground.

As the Kurdish community reacted with outrage, social media users shared online a portrait of Kobani smiling next to another shot of her brutalized body.

YPG male and female fighters have taken part in the battle by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces to expel Daesh from large parts of Syria.

SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said the video of the fighter's body was reason to continue fighting back against Turkey and its allies.

"Imagine the savagery of these invaders with the bodies of our daughters. How would they behave if they took control of our neighborhoods?" he wrote on Facebook.

"All this hatred and barbarity leaves us with a single option: to continue the resistance," he said.

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