Islamic State terrorist group claims assassination of two councilwomen in Syrian Kurdistan
The Islamic State (ISIS) group on Monday claimed responsibility for the Friday assassinations of two city council officials in Hasaka province in Syrian Kurdistan (Roajav), the group published on their Telegram propaganda channel.
Hind Latif al-Khadir was head of the economy committee in the town of Tel Shayir in Dashisha district, south of Hasaka province, and Sa’da Faysal al-Hermas was co-chair of the town’s people’s council. Both were kidnapped, shot and killed on Friday evening, according to a statement from the Hasaka provincial council, published by Hawar News Agency ANHA.
ISIS said they raided the house of the two leaders and killed them with machine guns, saying the officials were affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it described as an “apostate” group.
“This heinous crime is targeting free women and democratic values,” Mazloum Abdi [Kobani], the top commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), tweeted on Monday.
“We offer our condolences to the families of the two martyrs and promise our people we will pursue the criminal cells until justice prevails,” he added.
Both women had received death threats from ISIS, according to the UK-based conflict monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Their bodies were found in the town of al-Dashisha, in southern Hasaka province.
The worldwide-respected Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in Syrian Kurdistan has a secular decentralized self-rule, where equality between men and women, direct democracy, and environmental responsibility are emphasized.
Women have risen to prominent public roles under the Autonomous Administration in in Syrian Kurdistan. Every council and government office is gender-balanced with male and female co-leaders. Women have also made advancements economically and an all-female armed force gained international recognition in the war against ISIS.
In 2019, Hevrin Khalaf, leader of the Future Syria Party, was executed by Turkish-backed Islamic mercenary groups.
According to ISIS’s propaganda agency Amaq, the terror group carried out 593 attacks in Syria in 2020, killing and injuring 1,327 people, with the highest number of killed and injured recorded in eastern Syria’s Deir Ez-Zor.
According to Rojava Information Centre, Deir ez-Zor is the focal point of ISIS attacks in north and east Syria, with 73% of March attacks taking place in the province.
ISIS, which seized control of swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014, was declared defeated in late 2017 and early 2019 in Iraq and Syria respectively. However, remnants of the group have returned to their earlier insurgency tactics, ambushing security forces, kidnapping and executing suspected informants, and extorting money from vulnerable rural populations.
The Syrian Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, the de facto army of the autonomous Kurdish region, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
In 2013, the PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
Source: E-Kurd
