The Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People (YPJ), the main Kurdish militia in Syria, has battled other rebel groups in a bid to carve out an autonomous region in the northeast, where the army is no longer deployed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britannia-based group that relies on local activists and other sources, said that "since Saturday, a total of 19 localities have fallen into the hands of Kurdish fighters."
"The jihadists have been trying to regroup their fighters to reclaim lost ground," it said, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Al-Nusra Front, hardline groups linked to Al-Qaeda.
The Kurdish and jihadist fighters have long been battling for control of the northeastern Hasake province bordering Turkey and Iraq, which is rich in petroleum and grain.
The latest festivities came a week after Kurdish fighters seized the Yaarubiyeh crossing on the Iraq border, which had been a key transit point for arms and jihadist fighters carrying out attacks in both countries.
The fighting between the Kurds and rebels ostensibly struggling to overthrow Syrian
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Terror of Aleppo ...
has added another level of complexity to the civil war, which has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives since early 2011.