A war monitor said a senior commander from the security forces in northeast Syria’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-led administration was killed on Tuesday in a blast near a prison in Hasakeh province.
“A commander in the Kurdish security forces was killed and another person was wounded” in an explosion near the prison in Umm Fursan on the outskirts of the city of Qamishli “at the same time that a Turkish drone was flying in the area,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The commander in the Asayish security forces had played “a prominent role in leading military operations against the Islamic State group in Raqa province,” a former bastion of the jihadists in Syria, said the Britain-based Observatory.
The Asayish said in a statement that one of its “leadership comrades” was killed in Qamishli after a Turkish army drone targeted one of its vehicles at a detention center in Umm Fursan.
The Turkish defense ministry told AFP it had no information about the attack.
A local Kurdish news agency reported “the sound of an explosion… resulting from the targeting of a car” in the area.
The incident came a day after Syria’s Kurdish authorities in Hasakeh province released 50 Syrian prisoners accused of belonging to the IS group as part of a general amnesty deal, an official had told AFP.
The Kurds have established a semi-autonomous administration spanning swathes of the north and northeast of Syria.
The US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces spearheaded the battle that dislodged IS jihadists from their last scraps of Syrian territory in 2019.
Turkey sees the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which dominate the SDF, as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it considers a “terrorist” group.
The Turkish army, which has troops and proxies in northern Syria, regularly carries out strikes in Kurdish-held areas.
Turkey controls two large strips of territory along the border after expelling Kurdish forces in successive campaigns.