Thursday, January 8, 2026, Paris

For several days now, Islamist militias now wearing the uniform of the Syrian army have been surrounding and shelling the Kurdish neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Achrafieh on the outskirts of Aleppo.

These include the 62nd Brigade, known as Suleiman Shah-Emshat, the 72nd Brigade, known as Sultan Murad, the 76th Brigade, known as Hemzat, and the 86th Brigade, known as Noureddine Zangi, formerly affiliated with the so-called « Free Syrian Army », equipped and paid by the Turkish occupation forces, for which they have served as auxiliaries. These brigades have spread terror and carried out ethnic cleansing in the Kurdish territories under Turkish occupation: Afrin, Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ayn) and Girê Spî (Tell Abyad). In Serê Kaniyê, where Kurds represented 85 percent of the population, they now account for barely 1 percent. In a statement to the media, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Rami Abdurrahman, confirms that « the forces that previously attacked the Kurds in Afrin are today on the offensive against the Kurds of Aleppo ».
The two Kurdish neighborhoods under bombardment are home to around 400,000 Kurds, most of whom are displaced persons who fled the terror of Islamist militias in the Syrian Kurdish territories under Turkish occupation.

These militias shelling the Kurdish neighborhoods are equipped with heavy weapons, around sixty tanks and attack drones supplied by Turkey, which has also officially declared that it is « ready to support the Syrian army ». The scenario of bloody massacres of Kurdish civilians is becoming clearer day by day, despite the courageous resistance of the local Kurdish self-defense forces. 

After the massacre of Alawites in March and that of Druze in July, it is now the Kurds’ turn. Western chanceries, which have co-opted as a reliable ally the « converted » jihadist turned pragmatic leader, al-Chara, who replaces the al-Assad dictatorship with an Islamist dictatorship, promoted by the Turkey-Qatar tandem, remain silent in the face of the tragedy that is unfolding, apart from a few vague calls « for dialogue and moderation ».

The fact that these bombings occurred the day after the Erdogan-Trump phone call of January 5 suggests that Ankara received, if not a green light, at least tacit approval from Washington for this anti-Kurdish operation.

And the Kurds are left wondering: where have our allied « brothers in arms » gone, for whom we made so many sacrifices in the name of shared values in the war against ISIS?