Erdogan says Turkey aims to settle 1 million refugees in Syrian Kurdistan
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during his party’s parliamentary group meeting at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara on January 8, 2019. Photo: AP
ANKARA,— Turkey aims to settle one million Syrian war refugees in the area of Syrian Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northern Syria, where it carried out a military incursion in October 2019, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.
He told state broadcaster TRT that Ankara would finance the resettlement on its own if allies did not provide support.
Turkey and its Syrian Islamic militant allies launched the offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara views as a terrorist group. 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 (Ras al-Ain) to Girê Spî (Tel Abyad), 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.
Turkish state media last month 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.
Turkey had previously said it could settle up to 2 million Syrian refugees in a 444-km (275-mile)-long “safe zone” it aimed to form in northeastern Syria, and repeatedly urged NATO allies to provide financial aid for the plans.
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.
“The Turkish nation can carry out an exemplary step between Ras al Ain and Tel Abyad,” Erdogan said in his TRT interview, holding up a map of the region with markings on it. “Settling one million people between Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, that is our aim in the safe zone, that is our plan.”
Last week, Erdogan met his German, French and British counterparts on the sidelines of a NATO summit in London to hold talks on developments in Syria and his “safe zone” plan.
After the summit, Erdogan said one country, which he did not name, had pledged support for the plan but that Germany, France and Britain had not done so. He had previously said that Qatar could back it.
The European Union and Turkey’s allies in NATO have rejected its calls for financial assistance and condemned the Turkish offensive, which they said might hinder the fight against Islamic State in Syria. Turkey has dismissed the concerns.
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 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, 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.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | Reuters
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