It was not immediately clear which group was responsible for the kidnapping, though Kurdish officials accused Al-Qaeda’s affiliate Al-Nusra Front, which is active in Idlib province.<\/p>\n
“A group of 300 people on five coaches and a mini-bus coming from Afrin were kidnapped at a checkpoint as they went to Aleppo to collect their salaries,” said Newaf Khalil, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).<\/p>\n
The kidnapping was confirmed by a second official from the PYD, the main Kurdish party in Syria, and a journalist in Afrin, who said the women in the group had been freed but the men and children taken.<\/p>\n
The PYD officials accused Al-Nusra of being behind the kidnapping, but Abdul Rahman and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said it remained unclear which group was responsible (\u2026)<\/p>\n
The kidnapping occurred in northwestern Idlib province, where Al-Nusra and its allies wield considerable influence.<\/p>\n
The Al-Qaeda affiliate helped capture the provincial capital Idlib city on March 28 along with a coalition of other opposition groups.<\/p>\n
The incident is not the first mass kidnapping in Syria, where large groups of Kurds and Christians have been held, mostly by Al-Nusra’s extremist rival, the Islamic State group.<\/p>\n
IS fighters are accused of kidnapping over 200 Assyrian Christians from Hasakeh province, and last year held more than 150 Kurdish schoolchildren kidnapped in Aleppo province.<\/p>\n
Al-Nusra has also been implicated in kidnappings.<\/p>\n
It has been accused of holding journalists and aid workers and in 2013 kidnapped a group of 13 nuns who were later released in a prisoner exchange.<\/p>\n
More than 215,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-regime protests that spiralled into a bloody civil war after a government crackdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was not immediately clear which group was responsible for the kidnapping, though Kurdish officials accused Al-Qaeda’s affiliate Al-Nusra Front, which is active in Idlib province. “A group of 300 people on five coaches and a mini-bus coming from Afrin were kidnapped at a checkpoint as they went to Aleppo to collect their salaries,” said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[294,366,293],"tags":[475,476,463,217],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anti-terror-alert","category-hra","category-middle-east","tag-kidnap","tag-kurds","tag-syria","tag-terrorists"],"yoast_head":"\n