Turkey 'aided Islamist fighters' in attack on Kessab: Daily Telegraph

Rebels and eye-witnesses claim that Turkish authorities allowed fighters to enter Syria through a strategic border post to carry out assault on Armenian town of Kasab. As reports “Armenpress”, British Daily Telegraph stated this. Turkey facilitated an attack carried out by Islamist fighters against the Armenian town of Kasab inside Syria, eyewitnesses have told the Telegraph.

In an operation that was months in the planning, Turkish authorities gave rebel groups the mandate they needed to attack, allowing them access through a heavily militarised Turkish border post, whose location was strategically vital to the success of the assault. "Turkey did us a big favour," said a Syrian activist with the rebel group, whose name the Telegraph knows but has been asked not to reveal. "They allowed our guys to enter from their border post.

"We needed to hit the regime from different sides and this was the only way from near the coast, so it was a big help."
Kasab, the ancestral home of the Armenian ethnic minority in Syria, which had remained relatively sheltered from the conflict in Syria. Residents were woken on the morning of the attack, on March 21, to screams and cries. "We woke to the sounds of the shelling. There was no time even to get dressed," remembered Bedros, 45, an Armenian resident who asked not to be identified by his real name. "I grabbed my wife and my children. We had no time to take our things. Some people fled in their night gowns." Two days later Kasab was in the hands of an alliance of Islamist groups, including the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra, aligned with al-Qaeda. Almost all of the villages approximately 2,000 inhabitants had fled. The night of the attack a relative of Bedros had gone to one of the main border posts with Turkey, which is only lightly armed with Syrian troops, reportedly because of an agreement signed decades before the war "By the time he arrived the attack had begun. He saw the Islamist fighters standing with the Turkish army. They started launching their shells from the border".

The Turkish foreign ministry has issued a statement stating that the claims that the government aided the opposition in the attack are "totally unfounded and untrue". The armed incursion began on Friday, March 21, with rebels associated with Al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, Sham al-Islam and Ansar al-Sham crossing the Turkish border and attacking the Armenian civilian population of Kessab. The attackers immediately seized two guard posts overlooking Kessab, including a strategic hill known as Observatory 45 and later took over the border crossing point with Turkey. Snipers targeted the civilian population and launched mortar attacks on the town and the surrounding villages. According to eyewitness accounts, the attackers crossed the Turkish border with Syria openly passing through Turkish military barracks. According to Turkish media reports, the attackers carried their injured back to Turkey for treatment in the town of Yayladagi. Some 670 Armenian families, the majority of the population of Kessab, were evacuated by the local Armenian community leadership to safer areas in neighboring Basit and Latakia. Ten to fifteen families with relations too elderly to move were either unable to leave or chose to stay in their homes.

On Saturday, March 22, Syrian troops launched a counteroffensive in an attempt to regain the border crossing point, eye witnesses and state media reported. However, on Sunday, March 23, the extremist groups once again entered the town of Kessab, took the remaining Armenian families hostage, desecrated the town’s three Armenian churches, pillaging local residences and occupying the town and surrounding villages. Located in the northwestern corner of Syria, near the border with Turkey, Kessab had, until very recently, evaded major battles in the Syrian conflict. The local Armenian population had increased in recent years with the city serving as safe-haven for those fleeing from the war-torn cities of Yacubiye, Rakka and Aleppo.