Civilians have been killed in Turkish drone strikes in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria amid fierce fighting between the Turkish-supported Syrian National Army and the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces, said SDF spokesperson Farhad Shami. 

Shami said in a Wednesday press statement that an unmanned drone belonging to the Turkish military bombed a convoy of civilians traveling from north and eastern Syria as they were making their way to the Tishrin Dam. Several graphic photographs shared by the SDF’s WhatsApp account showed several individuals lying on a roadside soaked in blood. The number of civilian deaths remains unknown. Shami said a detailed report on the strikes would be published soon. 

He said the attacks coincided with ground assaults by the SNA on villages north of the dam and southeast of the town of Manbij, supported by Turkish airstrikes and artillery shelling. The spokesperson warned of a “catastrophic” collapse of the dam should the attacks continue. Such an outcome could trigger a failure of the Tabqa dam, Syria’s largest, flooding vast expanses of agricultural land in the region and potentially affecting neighboring Iraq, Syrian Kurdish officials say. 

Built on the Euphrates River in 1999 and lying 115 kilometers (71 miles) from Aleppo city, Tishrin is one of the most important dams in Syria. Its main function is to produce electricity. Since 2019, Turkey has been targeting critical infrastructure in the Kurdish-controlled zone, which covers around a quarter of Syrian territory, in a bid to destroy the self-declared Democratic Administration of North and East Syria. Power stations, water pumps, bakeries and oil infrastructure have been hit, creating acute shortages for millions of residents in the region. The attacks have also led to a rising number of civilian deaths.