MESOP Syria Daily: Signs of Regime-Kurdish Confrontation in Hasakah

By Scott Lucas July 23, 2015 – EAWORLDVIE – In a twist on the three-way fight for control of Hasakah in northeast Syria, the Kurdish military is accusing the Assad regime of covertly assisting the Islamic State — even as the Syrian military says that it has been repelling an IS offensive over the past month.The Assad forces and the Kurdish YPG militia are nominally on the same side against the Islamic State, which has repeatedly tried to enter the mainly-Kurdish city this year. State media says that, after the Islamic State took parts of southern Hasakah this month, the Syrian military and YPG have coordinated a response to push back the militants. It says that Assad troops and Kurdish fighters have each taken designated areas of Hasakah in the defense of the city.However, other reports have not been so positive about the supposed cooperation. Some pro-Assad outlets have accused the Kurds of letting the Syrian military face the Islamic State alone. Kurdish media and activists have said that Damascus effectively handed out parts of Hasakah to the YPG because they could not mount a defense against the Islamic State’s threat.Now Redur Khalil, the YPG spokesman, has accused the Assad regime and the National Defense Forces militia of betraying the Kurds.Khalil told a Kurdish website that Assad’s Baath Party and the NDF had “contributed to the entry” of the Islamic State into Hasakah, allowing the militants to establish “sleeper” cells for their attacks.The spokesman maintained that the Kurds now held about 75% of Hasakah. He said that the YPG had always been responsible for security in northern sections, but that it had to act in the south and after the regime’s “defenses collapsed completely”, making a confrontation between the Kurds and the Islamic State “inevitable”.He asserted that Kurdish units now controlled “all the entrances and exits” of Hasakah, with the Islamic State surrounded in the sections of the city — such as the Ghweiran neighborhood in the south — where it remained.Khalil said the Kurds, sometimes in alliance with the rebels of the Free Syrian Army, confronted the Islamic State along a 400-km (250-mile) front in northern and eastern Syria. He claimed that the Islamic State had used chlorine gas in chemical attacks on Kurdish fighters.A pro-opposition website asserts that fighting broke out on Thursday between Kurdish militia and Assad forces near a checkpoint and an Assyrian church in Hasakah.