“Stop Erdogan’s war against the Kurds in Afrin!”

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) supports the Syrian Kurds in their initiative to hold a rally in Brussels next Thursday (July 20) to protest against the ongoing attacks by the Turkish military on the predominantly Kurdish-inhabited region of Afrin in the north-west of Syria. The people of Afrin are living in fear that the Turkish army and their allies, the Syrian Islamist forces, are planning a large-scale offensive against the region, which has been almost completely cut off from the outside world for many years. Many civil war refugees have found shelter there.

For some weeks now, Turkey has been setting up heavy war equipment along the border to Afrin – and there have been attacks with heavy artillery and rockets almost every day. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the Turkish military and the radical Islamists also attacked the Yazidi villages of Kastal Jendo, Basufan, and Katma last Sunday. Some of the projectiles even landed near the eastern outskirts of the city of Afrin. Friends of the STP who live in Afrin confirmed this information. They reported that four civilians were wounded.

“A major offensive on Afrin will destabilize the entire region and lead to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and tens of thousands of Arabs who have been living in the region for years,” fears Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East Consultant. At the beginning of July, Kurds from Afrin had already asked the STP to pass on an appeal to German and European politicians and the public, asking them to do everything possible to prevent Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “unjustified war” against the civilian population of Afrin.

There are almost one million people living in the region, half of whom are refugees – mainly from Aleppo, which is 55 kilometers away. The city of Afrin, which had up to 80,000 inhabitants before the civil war, is located on the eponymous river, 25 kilometers to the south of the Syrian-Turkish border. The Afrin region consists of 366 villages and seven smaller towns. Most of the Kurds in the Afrin region are Sunni Muslims, but there are also tens of thousands of Kurdish Yazidis and Alawis. Between 2011 and 2017, the Turkish army killed a total number of 30 civilians from Afrin, and at least 44 were injured. About 15,000 olive trees were destroyed, and grain fields were set on fire in the summer months.

 Header Photo: Tîrast Cudî STP's archive