Syria's official news agency SANA said on Monday that the groups stole the equipment of irrigation wells, fuel, and farming tools in the village of Tal Mohammad east of Seri Kani.
“The terrorists driving Turkish cars stormed dozens of houses and pillaged crops and furniture in a number of villages and towns in Ra's al-Ayn (Seri Kani) countryside,” SANA said.
Turkish ‘occupation’ forces, as SANA reported, were attempting to recruit young local men to “fight alongside their mercenaries either at gunpoint or by tempting … with money.”
The official Syrian news agency said the Turkish-backed terrorists had also carried out excavations and desecrated a shrine located between the villages of Joqa and Kukan in the countryside of Afrin in the northwestern city of Aleppo.
The terrorists searched for archeological artifacts to smuggle and sell in Turkey, with local sources saying they had transported a number of bags from the excavation sites to Afrin.
On October 9, Turkish military forces and Ankara-backed militants launched a long-threatened cross-border invasion of northeastern Syria in a declared attempt to push YPG Kurdish militants away from border areas.
Ankara views the US-backed YPG as a terrorist organization tied to the homegrown Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been seeking an autonomous Kurdish region in Turkey since 1984.
On October 22, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a memorandum of understanding that asserted YPG militants had to withdraw from the Turkish-controlled "safe zone" in northeastern Syria within 150 hours, after which Ankara and Moscow would run joint patrols around the area.
The Kurdish-led administration in northeastern Syria says the Turkish offensive has killed 218 civilians, including 18 children, since its outset.
Ankara has threatened to launch another military operation in the swathe of land bordering Turkey unless the pullout of Kurdish forces from the area is completed.
Ankara wants to see a 32-kilometer “safe zone” established in northeastern Syria which is clear of Kurdish militants and where it can relocate a great percentage of the more than three million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
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