30 April 2016•Update: 30 April 2016
By Esra Kaymak Avci
WASHINGTON
The U.S. on Friday strongly condemned a video that shows the PKK terrorist group’s Syrian wing, Democratic Union Party's (PYD), parade with corpses of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters in Afrin, Syria.
"While we can't authenticate it 100 percent, we, without hesitation, strongly condemn this kind of behavior that it depicts and believe that it only serves to heighten tensions between those groups in western Syria," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
Toner also stated that the US has not provided any support to "Kurdish groups in Afrin" and expressed its concerns about the clashes in the region.
"This fighting has to stop," Toner said. "It's destabilizing, to say the least. It's counterproductive."
On Thursday, videos on social media showed members of the PYD, transporting bodies of Free Syrian Army (FSA) members in an open top trailer after they had been killed in a clash in northern Syria.
Local sources said the terrorist PYD group repelled the FSA and it brought about 50 dead bodies of FSA members to Afrin, which is close to Ayn-Dakna village in Tel Rifaat, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Turkish border.
A resident in Afrin told Anadolu Agency that the PYD transported the bodies in an open top trailer.
The authenticity of the footage could not be independently verified.
Over some previous reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that the PYD's armed wing, YPG, committed war crimes in Syria, Toner said he had no update on the issue.
He added, though, that the U.S. took any "serious" and "credible" allegations very seriously.
