A young German woman fighting
alongside Kurdish forces in Syria was killed over the weekend in clashes
with Islamic State fighters, Kurdish officials and a Turkey-based
communist group said on Monday.
The Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. air strikes and local
rebel fighters, have been battling Islamic State in northern Syria since
the al Qaeda offshoot captured large tracts of land along the border
with Turkey.
The woman, Ivana Hoffmann, was killed in a village near the town of Tel
Tamr in northeastern Syria, Kurdish official Nasir Haj Mansour said. She
had joined female Kurdish fighting units, known as the YPJ, two to
three months ago, he said.
Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for the Kurdish PYD party in
Europe, confirmed she had died over the weekend. He sent a photo of the
woman in uniform posing in front of a red and yellow flag representing
the Turkey-based Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP).
Her photo was included with images of two other foreigners killed fighting alongside the Kurds in recent weeks.
The MLKP, a militant left-wing group close to the YPG and
PKK separatist movement in Turkey, said Hoffmann was a member of its
organisation. In a statement on its website it described her as a
19-year-old German-born communist of African descent who had joined the
MLKP at young age while living in Germany.
It said she had joined Kurdish fighters to defend
Christian villages in northeastern Syria following attacks by the
Islamic State. It described her as a sharpshooter and said she had been
killed in frontline fighting.
German officials declined to comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment