Turkey-backed Syrian Islamic Arabic mercenary fighters near the Kurdish town of Gire Spi (Tel Abyad) in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), October 12, 2019. Photo: Reuters
NEW YORK,— Human Rights Watch on Wednesday denounced abuses including executions and home confiscations in a Turkish-controlled swathe of Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), northern Syria, where Ankara says it wants to resettle Syrian refugees.
Turkey last month established what it has dubbed a “safe zone” in a 120-kilometre (70-mile)-long strip of land it seized from Syrian Kurdish fighters along its southern border.
The New York-based watchdog urged Turkey and its Syrian Islamic Arab proxies to investigate “human rights abuses, in many cases potential war crimes,” in the area running 30 kilometres (18 miles) deep into Syrian territory.
“Executing individuals, pillaging property and blocking displaced people from returning to their homes is damning evidence of why Turkey’s proposed ‘safe zones’ will not be safe,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW.
Ankara claims it wants to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts on Turkish soil in the area grabbed through a deadly offensive and subsequent deals.
“Contrary to Turkey’s narrative that their operation will establish a safe zone, the groups they are using to administer the territory are themselves committing abuses against civilians and discriminating on ethnic grounds,” Whitson said.
The group also said that Turkey-backed fighters had failed to account for aid workers who disappeared while working in the “safe zone”.
Turkey’s October 9, 2019 invasion was the latest in a series of military operations on Syrian Kurdistan soil against Kurdish fighters.
Another Turkey-led offensive early last year saw pro-Ankara mercenary Islamic fighters take the northwestern Kurdish region of Afrin from Kurdish combatants, with rights groups also reporting similar abuses in that region.
Turkish state media on Friday said around 70 Syrians, including women and children, crossed the border to the Syrian Kurdish town of Serêkaniye (Ras al-Ayn) in the first of such returns.
But analysts have cast doubt on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s claims that Turkey can repatriate up to two million Syrians to the “safe zone”.
The Kurds argue that Turkey’s goal of a “safe zone” is to weaken the Kurdish presence in Syrian Kurdistan by modifying the demographics of the area with the return of mostly Islamic Sunni Arab refugees.
Human rights organisations in October 2019 accused Turkey of “forcibly” deporting refugees to war-torn Syria in the months leading up to its military incursion in the neighbouring country.
Amnesty International said it spoke with refugees who said Turkish police had beaten or threatened them into signing documents stating that they were asking to return to Syria.
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 Kurdish Democratic Union Party 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.
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