Syrian Kurdish General, Mazloum Abdi Kobani, the Commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, the de facto army of the autonomous administrative region in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), October 24, 2019. Photo: VOA video/Wikimedia Commons.
QAMISHLO, Syrian Kurdistan,— The commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), General Mazloum Abdi Kobani, has said the settlement of a million Syrian refugees in the Kurdish northeastern part of the country now controlled by Turkey is “dangerous and means demographic change.”
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that Ankara plans to settle one million Syrian war refugees in the area of Syrian Kurdistan where it carried out a military incursion in October 2019.
“We call on the US and Russia, who bear the responsibility of preventing this, to work on a mechanism to facilitate return of the true owners of the land,” tweeted Kobani.
General Kobani said that the remarks by the Turkish president were alarming and proof of an attempt by Turkey to ethnically cleanse the area, located along the Turkish-Syrian border between the cities of Girê Spî (Tel Abyad) and Serêkaniyê (Ras al-Ain), of much of its Kurdish population.
Erdogan told state broadcaster TRT that Ankara would finance the resettlement on its own if allies did not provide support, according to Reuters. Turkey currently hosts more than 3.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria’s 8-1/2-year-old war. Turkish officials have not indicated when any resettlement of refugees would begin.
In November 2019 Turkish state media said around 200 Syrians, including women and children, crossed the border to the Turkey-occupied Kurdish northern Syrian in the first of such returns.
But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, says most of those returning are Arabs, not Kurds.
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.
Luqman Ahmi, a spokesperson for the Kurdish-led self-administration for northeast Syria, told Kurdistan 24 previously that Turkey’s plan for its “safe zone” between Girê Spî and Serêkaniyê is similar to the demographic change that Turkish and Turkish-backed forces have already caused in the northwestern Kurdish city of Afrin.
“We have seen Turkey do the same in the Afrin region where over 250,000 people were displaced, and have been forced to leave their homes and properties,” Ahmi said.
According to a June report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), there have been strong indications of an intentional campaign of forced demographic change since Turkey took over Afrin from Kurdish forces in March 2018.
“Many civilians seeking to return to their homes have found them occupied by these fighters and their families, who have refused to vacate them and return them to their rightful owners,” the report said.
On October 9, 2019 Turkey and its Syrian Islamic militant allies launched the offensive against the Kurdish YPG forces, the de facto army of the Syrian autonomous Kurdish region. After seizing a strip of land inside Syria 120 km (75 miles) long and around 30 km (18 miles) wide running from the Kurdish town of Serêkaniyê to Girê Spî, Turkey signed separate deals with the United States and Russia to halt its assault.
Rights groups and displaced Kurdish families have accused Ankara-backed Syrian Arab Islamic militants of executions, home confiscations and looting in that border strip.
The monitor said in October that more than 300,000 civilians, mostly Kurds, had been displaced by the assault, calling it one of the largest upheavals since Syria’s civil war began in 2011.
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.
(With files from nrttv.com | kurdistan24.net | Reuters)
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