UNHCR headquarters in Geneva. Photo: unhcr.org
GENEVA,— A Syrian Kurdish man set himself on fire Wednesday outside the headquarters of the United Nations refugee agency and was receiving treatment for his injuries, police told AFP.
The 31-year-old German resident did not provide any explanation for his actions, Geneva police spokesman Silvain Guillaume-Gentil said.
“We can imagine his reasons, but we do not have anything concrete,” Guillaume-Gentil said. “He had a hard time expressing himself when help arrived.”
Kurds have organised a series of demonstrations to protest the assault that Turkey launched on October 9, 2019 against Kurdish fighters in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the Kurdish region in northeastern Syria, after an announced US military pullout.
The incident occurred shortly before 8:00 am (0600 GMT) outside UNHCR, which is across the street from the Palais des Nations, the UN’s European headquarters.
Responders arrived quickly and the injured man was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Lausanne, where he was being treated for his injuries, police said.
The US pullout has largely been seen as a betrayal of Syria’s Kurds, who have spent most of the country’s civil war working towards autonomy.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s eight-year war.
In 2013, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
The PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP