Turkey sent 19 buses loaded with families of Syrian mercenary Islamic Arab fighters over the border to the cities of Girê Spî /Tal Abyad and Serêkaniyê /Ras Al Ain in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), April 2020. Photo: Activists via ANHA news agency.
GIRÊ SPI, Syrian Kurdistan,— As the world is busy with coronavirus pandemic, Turkey sent 19 buses loaded with families of Syrian mercenary Islamic Arab fighters over the border to the cities of Girê Spî /Tal Abyad and Serêkaniyê /Ras Al Ain in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the Turkish-occupied Kurdish region in northern Syria, activists and Hawar news agency ANHA said on Wednesday.
“The new arrivals, who are the families of the Turkish-backed armed groups, will be settled in Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain in the houses left by their owners who fled the town after the Turkish attacks in October,” Ahmad, a Syrian Arab activist who asked to conceal his name for security reasons, told Kurdistan 24.
Ahmad added that people who stayed in the town were angry with the Turkish authorities for bringing people from other Syrian provinces and relocating them in the border areas.
“More busses carrying the families of the militants of the Turkish-backed groups of Ahrar Al-Sharqiya and Al-Shamiya Front will arrive in a few days to be transferred and resettled in the town of Ras al-Ain,” he said.
Local media in northern Syria report that the busses contained Syrian families from Ghouta around Damascus, Idlib, Homs and the northern Aleppo countryside.
Activists in the town published videos on social media showing the militants waiting for their families on the border crossing gate of Tal Abyad.
Activists also said the new arrivals were transported at the expense of Turkish authorities who granted them houses whose owners already left after the Turkish invasion in October 2019.
On October 9, 2019, Turkey and its Syrian Islamic militant allies launched the offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia. The seized a strip of land inside Syria’s Kurdish region 120 km long and around 30 km (18 miles) wide running from the Kurdish town of Serêkaniyê to Girê Spî.
Since the Turkish cross-border invasion on Serekaniye, scores of violations against local civilians have been consistently and credibly reported by residents and observers. Moreover, many who have attempted to return to their towns under Turkish control faced brutality, arrest, and torture, especially members of the Kurdish population.
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.
Turkish state media said in November 2019 that around 200 Syrians, including women and children, crossed the border to the Turkish-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.
Turkey launched its so-called “Peace Spring” operation on Oct. 9, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands and the death of at least dozens of civilians.
The campaign was put on hold after the United States and Russia struck separate deals with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to allow the withdrawal of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from a planned buffer zone Ankara refers to as a “safe zone.”
Erdogan said in December that Ankara aims to resettle up to one million Syrian refugees as a first batch in the buffer zone under its control, many of them from other parts of the country.
Local Kurdish populations and multiple international observers see this as an intentional effort by Turkey to ethnically cleanse Kurds from areas along its borders. The United Nations has said there are strong indications that Turkish and Turkish-backed forces have already enacted such a campaign of forced demographic change in the Kurdish-majority city of Afrin.
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, the de facto army of the autonomous Kurdish region, 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.
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.
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