Mavi Boncuk | Without citing specific sources, the state-run news agency unveiled the ten US outposts located in areas controlled by “terrorist” Kurdish militias in the provinces of Aleppo, Hasakah and Raqqa.
The reports said that the military outposts are “usually hidden for security reasons, making it hard to be detected.” It said they were located “in the terrorist PKK/PYD-held Syrian territories,” a reference to Kurdish groups that Turkey’s government considers terrorist organizations. While locations of two of the bases, in Rmeilan district (in Hasakah province) and Harab Isk village (near Kobani, in Aleppo province), had already been widely publicized, the others had been mentioned only in outside reports, or were completely unknown. Anadolu’s story also provided systematic and detailed information about troop numbers, equipment, and US operational procedures at the outposts.
According to Bloomberg, Levent Tok, an Anadolu Agency reporter on the story, said the information about U.S. troop positions wasn’t leaked. "The story was based on field work by Anadolu’s Syria reporters and some of the information on bases had been broadcast on social media by Kurdish fighters", he told Bloomberg on Wednesday. “The U.S. should have thought about this before it cooperated with a terrorist organization,” he said.
The Anadolu report claims that the US operates several types of facilities in the Kurdish-controlled territories. Some are “field-type military points” which are “usually hidden for security reasons, making it hard to be detected.” The most prominent of these is Rmeilan, established in the Al-Hasakah province in October 2015. It has an airfield through which cargo planes deliver weapons to the fighters – one of the two major arms routes into the country, along with a land route from Iraq, according to the news agency. Another is Harab Isk, a helicopter base set up near Kobani in March 2016.
Apart from the more traditional facilities, the US-led coalition “uses some other places which are hard to be detected like residential areas, PKK/YPD camps, easily transformed factories.” Eight of the facilities are staffed with officers responsible “for airstrikes and artillery shelling, military consultants, training officers, [and] operational planning officers.”
“The equipment in the military points includes artillery batteries with high maneuverability, multi-barrel rocket launchers, various mobile equipment for intelligence and armored vehicles such as ‘Stryker’ for general patrols and security,” the report adds.