Kurds plan to set up an administration in North Syria, PYD says

 Syrian Human rights Observatory said more than 60 opposition fighters were killed in violence that has raged in the northeastern province of Hassakeh this week. Pro-government Kurdish fighters captured a major checkpoint Saturday morning in the province after intense clashes with al-Qaida-linked rebels, the Observatory said.

Kurdish gunmen captured mortars, jeeps with heavy machine guns mounted on them as well as large amounts of weapons at the checkpoint that sits on a main road intersection in Hassakeh, the group said.

The Kurdish forces, which back Assad, have fought rebels from radical Islamic groups in the northern region for months now.

Those killed in the fighting include 19 Kurdish fighters of the pro-government Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD, as well as 35 al-Qaida-linked fighters from the Jabhat al-Nusra or Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Observatory said.

PYD spokesman Nawaf Khalil told the U.S.-funded Radio Sawa that Kurds plan to set up an administration in the predominantly Kurdish region to run its affairs.

"Is it possible for an area twice the size of Lebanon to remain for the next 10 years without an interim administration and without special constitutions for the Kurds?" Khalil asked in remarks broadcast Saturday. "We need a process that makes us administer the region in a better way."

Last year, as the fighting intensified in the northern province of Aleppo, Assad's forces were stretched thin and pulled back from mainly Kurdish towns and villages near the Turkish border, ceding control to armed Kurdish fighters.

Since then, Syria's Kurdish minority carved out a once unthinkable degree of independence in their areas, creating their own police forces, issuing their own license plates and exuberantly going public with their language and culture.

Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in Syria, make up more than 10 percent of the country's 23 million people and have seen their loyalties split in the conflict between pro- and anti-Assad groups. The minority is centered in the poor northeastern regions of Hassakeh and Qamishli, wedged in between the borders of Turkey and Iraq. Damascus and Aleppo also have several predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods.

More than 93,000 people have been killed since the Syria crisis started in March 2011, according to the United Nations, as largely peaceful protests against Assad's rule. It escalated into a civil war after opposition supporters took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown on dissent.