Deadly clashes erupted Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of northern Aleppo, as talks aimed at absorbing the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces into Syria’s national army showed little progress, according to Associated Press reporting.
SANA, Syria’s state-run news agency, said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack it attributed to the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF.
SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded when the SDF shelling hit its office. The SDF, in a statement, denied that it was behind the shelling that killed the civilians, saying instead that a shell launched by “factions affiliated with the Damascus government” landed in the al-Midan neighborhood. The SDF said the target was the adjacent Kurdish Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood.
“This indiscriminate shelling constitutes a direct attack on residential areas and exposes the lives of civilians to grave danger,” the SDF said. The group also characterized the attacks as “planned and deliberate,” saying they systematically targeted infrastructure and essential services, including water and electricity.
The SDF further said government forces carried out other strikes affecting Kurdish neighborhoods. It said a drone strike launched by government forces killed one resident in Sheikh Maqsoud and wounded two children. Separately, it said shelling in the nearby Bani Zaid neighborhood killed a woman and wounded dozens, and it said there was no mention of those incidents in state media.
At Aleppo’s Al-Razi Hospital, Ahmad Abu Sheikh said his 4-year-old daughter, Fatima, was on the operating table for hours after being hit by shrapnel from a shell. He said she lost her eye, and he added: “I just want to know what can I tell my daughter when I see her? Where did her eye go?”
Afrin Jawan, a civil society activist in Sheikh Maqsoud, said in a message that thousands of civilians were besieged in Kurdish neighborhoods and “subjected to indiscriminate shelling with all types of heavy and medium weapons … by factions affiliated with the Ministry of Defense in Damascus.” The report said Sheikh Maqsoud and Achrafieh, predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, have seen intermittent clashes in recent months, with previous rounds ending in truces.
The fighting comes as the SDF—described in the report as having tens of thousands of fighters—remains the main force the central government is seeking to absorb into Syria’s military. The leadership in Damascus under interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed a deal in March with the SDF for it to merge with the Syrian army by the end of 2025, and the report said disagreements over how that integration would proceed have continued.
In April, the report said scores of SDF fighters left Sheikh Maqsoud and Achrafieh as part of the deal. Officials from the central government and the SDF met again Sunday in Damascus, but government officials said there was no tangible progress.
The report also said some factions now making up a new Syrian army—formed after the fall of former President Bashar Assad in a rebel offensive in December 2024—were previously Turkish-backed insurgent groups with a long history of clashes with Kurdish forces. It said the SDF has been the main U.S. partner in Syria against the Islamic State group, while Turkey considers the SDF a terrorist organization because of its association with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
Both sides have accused each other of seeking to derail the March agreement. Syria’s Defense Ministry said in a Tuesday statement that the SDF does not recognize the March 10 Agreement and is trying to derail it and drag the army into an open battle of its choosing.
By Tuesday evening, the report said a tense calm returned, but clashes flared up again within hours.