Breaking a long lull in its military campaign against Kurdish forces in northeast Syria, Turkey has launched a series of drone strikes targeting high-profile members of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), apparently with quiet nods from Russia and the United States.

The YPG lost around two dozen members, including senior figures, in about 20 drone strikes that hit YPG targets last week, including vehicles carrying military commanders, meeting places and command centers. 

The YPG forms the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which controls much of northeast Syria, as part of a de facto autonomous administration along the border with Turkey. Ankara views both outfits as terrorist groups for their links with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which took up arms in southeast Turkey in 1984 and is designated as a terrorist organization by Ankara, Washington and much of the international community. Washington, however, makes a distinction between the PKK and the SDF, its chief local ally in Syria.

One of the strikes hit a YPG vehicle on the Qamishli-Amuda road Aug. 19, killing Salahuddin Shahabi, a senior field commander known also by his nom de guerre Renas Roj, a member of the YPG military council and their driver. It was the first Turkish attack against a YPG target since Operation Peace Spring in fall 2019, when Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels wrestled control from the YPG in a border pocket between Ras al-Ain and Tell Abyad, including a section of the strategic M4 highway. According to Turkish news reports, the strike went ahead after Turkey’s intelligence service learned that Shahabi, the commander of the YPG’s Hasakah-Qamishli headquarters, had left Hasakah by car. A Turkish TB-2 Bayraktar drone hit the vehicle in the pre-dawn hours after it left residential areas, according to the reports.