Members of the Kurdish Red Crescent check passengers upon their arrival at the Qamishlo airport in Syrian Kurdistan after the outbreak of coronavirus, April 5, 2020. Photo: AFP
QAMISHLO, Syrian Kurdistan,— The Kurdish-led administration in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) that runs much of northeastern Syria said it had recorded its first death from the new coronavirus, according to a statement on Friday in which it cited the World Health Organisation.
The administration said in the statement that a 53-year-old man had died at a hospital in the main Kurdish city of Qamishlo on April 2 and that a sample sent to Damascus for testing was later confirmed as positive.
Syria has 33 confirmed coronavirus cases and two deaths, according to data collected by John Hopkins University from World Health Organization (WHO) partners.
The statement also accused the WHO of failing to inform the Kurdish-led autonomous administration when it learned of the man’s test result, which was among six cases announced by the Syrian health ministry on April 2.
The Syrian health ministry reported the first official case of COVID-19 infection in the country on March 22 and the first death on March 30, but the man’s case is the first known infection in the Kurdish region in Syria’s north.
In March 2020, Human Rights Watch has accused Turkey of ‘weaponizing water’ in Syrian Kurdistan.
Turkish authorities’ failure to ensure adequate water supplies to Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the Kurdish areas in Northeast Syria, is compromising humanitarian agencies’ ability to prepare and protect vulnerable communities in the COVID-19 pandemic, Human Rights Watch said in March. Turkish authorities should immediately do everything they can to resume supplying water through the Allouk water pumping station.
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.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of foreigners suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children, during the battle against IS in Syria and are being held in by Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s civil 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 worldwide-respected PYD-led Autonomous Administration in Syrian Kurdistan has a secular decentralized self-rule, where equality between men and women, direct democracy, and environmental responsibility are emphasized.
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