Suspected Islamist rebels were reported on Monday to have abducted up to 300 Kurdish civilians in northern Syria.
The Kurdish Hawar News Agency reported that fighters from the al-Nusra Front – the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda – stopped a convoy of buses taking the civilians from the Kurdish enclave of Efrin, in northwestern Syria, to Aleppo and Damascus.
The fighters took the passengers to a sharia (Islamic law) court in a nearby town, said the agency, which is close to the Kurdish forces that control Efrin.
The female passengers were released but the men were held, the report added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the passengers, whose number it could not confirm, were being held by “Islamist brigades.”
Their captors were demanding the release of three men being held in Efrin on suspicion of unauthorized digging for archaeological artefacts, Observatory director Rami Abdel-Rahman said.
The abduction came as Kurdish authorities in Efrin announced that they had brokered the release of 15 women and 10 children from the Syrian regime-held towns of Nubul and Zahraa, north of Aleppo, in return for a rebel leader being held by local pro-government fighters.
There have been several previous instances of Islamist fighters kidnapping civilians travelling between the Kurdish enclaves of Efrin and Kobane and Aleppo.
In May, the Islamic State group kidnapped some 150 Kurdish teenagers returning to Kobane after sitting secondary school exams in Aleppo.
They were released in groups over the following six months and reported being beaten and subjected to compulsory religious education classes.
The Kurdish nationalist Democratic Union Party (PYD), which in effect controls Syria’s three self-declared Kurdish autonomous cantons, is reviled by Islamic State and many other Islamists as atheistic.
GNA
