Government continues besieging Kurdish-majority neighborhoods in Syria’s Aleppo
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – For about two weeks, Syrian government forces have imposed a siege on two Kurdish-majority neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo, northern Syria, leaving 200,000 civilians without flour and fuel.
Both Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh neighborhoods, northern Aleppo, are semi-autonomous and run by a civil administration.
The two neighborhoods, in addition to the IDPs camps and villages in the northern countryside of Aleppo are housing the IDPs of Afrin who fled the violations and the invasion of the Turkish army and the Turkish-backed armed opposition factions since their control of Afrin in 2018.
For 12th day in a row, the Fourth Armored Division of the government forces has been denying the entry of food staples to Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh.
The neighborhoods are separated from the other neighborhoods in Aleppo by three government security checkpoints; Ashrafiyeh, Awared, and Maghsalat al-Jazira.
The siege imposed by the government forces led the residents of the neighborhoods to run out of bread.
In a previous statement to North Press, Adar Hussein, official at the Economic Corporation of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh, said for two months they have been suffering from an intermittent siege on the part of the Syrian government, considering that the lack of bread is a humanitarian catastrophe.
“More than 25,000 families or approximately 200,000 people who live in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh neighborhoods need 25 tons of flour daily, equivalent to 750 tons of flour per month,” Hussein said.
On April 9, the residents of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh protested against the siege imposed on them by the government forces.
The two neighborhoods have become a safe haven for many people from both inside and outside the city of Aleppo. This has led to the activation of trade and industrial movement, but the Syrian government besiege them frequently.
Also, both Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh enjoy security and stability better than that of the other neighborhoods in Aleppo, which made them to be a target of the armed opposition factions several times.
In 2012, the Turkish-backed armed opposition factions launched an onslaught against Sheikh Maqsoud, but it was repelled by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish military force which was present there at the time.
On this day in 2016, the armed factions bombed Sheikh Maqsoud with toxic gas which caused numerous civilian causalities. The incident was named as “war crimes” by Amnesty International then.
“Armed groups surrounding the Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo city have repeatedly carried out indiscriminate attacks that have struck civilian homes, streets, markets and mosques, killing and injuring civilians and displaying a shameful disregard for human life,” the organization said at the time.