Syria's War of Ethnic Cleansing: Kurds Face a Massacre in Afrin
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent
14 March 18
The Wars in Syria: In the final part of his series from Syria, Patrick
Cockburn reveals how all-out sieges like Eastern Ghouta and Afrin are
bringing forced demographic change to the whole country
Syrian Arab militiamen leading the Turkish attack on Afrin in northern Syria
are threatening to massacre its Kurdish population unless they convert to
the variant of Islam espoused by Isis and al-Qaeda. In the past such demands
have preceded the mass killings of sectarian and ethnic minorities in both
Syria and Iraq.
In one video a militia fighter flanked by others describes the Kurds as
"infidels" and issues a stark warning, saying "by Allah, if you repent and
come back to Allah, then know that you are our brothers. But if you refuse,
then we see that your heads are ripe, and that it's time for us to pluck
them." Though the Kurds in Afrin are Sunni Muslims, Isis and al-Qaeda
traditionally punish those who fail to subscribe to their beliefs as
heretics deserving death.
"The video is 100 per cent authentic," said Rami Abdulrahman, who heads the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which released it, in an interview with
The Independent. He adds that he is very concerned about the fate of some
Yazidi villages in Afrin captured by the advancing Turkish forces, saying he
has seen videos taken by the militiamen themselves in one of which "an
elderly Yazidi man is questioned by them, asking him how many times he prays
a day."
Such interrogations of Yazidis by Isis to prove that they were not Muslims
often preceded the killings, rapes and the taking of Yazidi women as sex
slaves when Isis seized Yazidi areas in northern Iraq in 2014. Mr
Abdulrahman, who is the leading human rights monitor in Syria with a network
of informants throughout the country, says he is worried that international
attention is entirely focused on the Syrian army assault on Eastern Ghouta
and "nobody is talking about" the potential slaughter of the Kurds and other
minorities in Afrin.
He says that the two situations are similar since "President Bashar
al-Assad's forces have taken 60 per cent of Ghouta and [President Recep
Tayyip] Erdogan's forces have taken 60 per cent of Afrin." He says that as
many as one million Kurds may be threatened and adds that it is becoming
extremely difficult for them to escape from Afrin because Syrian government
checkpoints on the only road leading south to Aleppo "are demanding bribes
of up to $4,000 per family to let people through."
Mr Abdulrahman points to growing evidence drawn from videos taken by
themselves of militiamen claiming to be members of the Free Syrian Army
(FSA) that the units advancing ahead of regular Turkish troops are extreme
jihadis. This has previously been asserted by a former Isis member in an
interview published by The Independent last month who said that many of his
former comrades had been recruited and retrained by the Turkish military. He
said that Isis recruits had been instructed by Turkish trainers not to use
their traditional tactics, such as the of extensive use of car bombs,
because this would identify them as terrorists. He suspected that Isis
fighters would be used as cannon fodder in Turkey's war against the Kurdish
People's Protection Units (YPG) and then discarded.
As the Turkish army closes in on Afrin and the Syrian army penetrates deeply
into the opposition stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, people in both areas fear
that they will be the victims of enforced demographic change. One Kurdish
observer in Iraq said that he thought Mr Erdogan, who has claimed that the
majority in Afrin is not Kurdish, will "bring in Turkmen and others to
replace the Kurdish population."
Isis is particularly hostile to the US-backed YPG, as its most effective
enemy which drove it out of a quarter of Syrian territory and captured the
de facto Isis capital of Raqqa last October after a four-month siege.
As Mr Abdulrahman says, the sieges of Afrin and Eastern Ghouta have much in
common, though the number of those trapped in Afrin may be larger. Motives
for refusing to leave are also much the same. "I will never leave Ghouta,"
said Haytham Bakkar, an anti-government journalist living there, speaking
just as the present Syrian Army assault was getting underway. "We have lived
here for hundreds and thousands of years. Here our grandparents lived. Here
are our houses and tombs. We were born here and we will die here. Our souls
and roots are here."
Bakkar says that most people in Eastern Ghouta are convinced that their
departure is part of a broader government plan to make drastic demographic
changes whereby their property would be given to others. He says that even
if people survived the dangerous journey out of the area, they did not want
"to watch TV news and see strangers living in our homes."
Kurds make a similar calculation, but it is also becoming extremely
dangerous for them to try to flee. Precedents have already been set for
ethnic and sectarian cleansing all over Syria since 2011 as those in control
oust members of other communities.
The YPG is a formidable force and the YPG spokesman Nouri Mahmoud says that
the group has 10,000 fighters in the enclave who would fight to the end. He
says that Kurds are already being displaced and "in one village alone 600
people were told to go." He said that the Kurds feared a genocide was in the
making and complained that "the international media focus on Eastern Ghouta
has given the Turks the opportunity to step up their attack on Afrin without
the rest of the world paying much attention". The Kurdish authorities are
trying to publicise the sufferings of civilians in Afrin, but are so far not
having much success.
In the long term - and possibly in the short term - Afrin may prove to be
indefensible. It is surrounded by Turkish forces and their FSA allies who
are vastly superior in numbers and heavy weapons and are able to use air
power and artillery without opposition.
None of the foreign players in the Syrian crisis show any sign of
intervening against Turkey. The Turks were able to invade Afrin on 20
January because Russia decided it would no longer defend its airspace as it
had been doing previously. Kurdish leaders say they believe that Russia,
Iran and Turkey have agreed that Turkey will get Afrin, possibly in exchange
for the Turks agreeing to drop their support for the one big remaining
anti-Assad enclave in Idlib.
The Turkish offensive against the Kurds in Afrin will not end when it falls,
but its elimination may set the stage for further Turkish attacks against
Kurdish-held territory further east. This will bring the Turks into a
confrontation with the Washington which will try mediate, but, if US forces
are to stay in Syria, then they will still need the Kurds as their one ally
on the ground. But, if the fall of Afrin is accompanied by mass killings and
ethnic cleansing, then the war in northern Syria is about to get a whole lot
worse.
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