On Monday, following attacks on Syrian-Kurdish positions by the Turkish army, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) urged Germany and the governments of all NATO member states to compel their NATO-partner Turkey to seek a peaceful solution for Syria. “It is intolerable that Turkey is now fighting the forces that – since at least 2012 – suffered heavy losses while fighting the “Islamic State” and other Islamist extremists such as the Al Nusra Front, Ahrar Al Sham, Jaish Al Islam, Jaish Al Mujahideen or the Islamic Front,” stated the human rights organization in Göttingen. “Turkey, as a NATO member and a EU-candidate, must ensure that all kinds of Islamist militias are weakened at the NATO’s and the European Union’s outer borders. Also, there must be a political solution for Syria.”

According to the London-based oppositional Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the Turkish army attacked positions of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) with heavy artillery on Saturday. There are eight civilians among the victims, including a young mother with her child, and three members of the Kurdish “People’s Protection Untis” (YPG). The two young men – Muhammed Ali (born in Afrin) and Kamiran Dagelbeldrash (born in Kobani) and the young woman Fayza Nasso from Afrin died because they did not want to flee to Europe, but decided to stay and fight the Islamist extremists,” said Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East Consultant. The SOHR reported that thousands of people were forced to flee to the center of the Afrin region due to Turkish artillery attacks.

The Turkish government claims that the attacks are supposed to strengthen the “moderate” Syrian opposition – meaning the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of the international terrorist network Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists that are trying to establishment a supposedly moderate Sunni-Islamic state in Syria, as the STP criticized. Apparently, Ankara is planning to occupy a 110-kilometer strip in the north of the neighboring country, where Syrian Islamists and jihadists from all over the world can be trained and then sent to fight the Syrian regime in a “holy war”.

Turkey is in fact trying to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria. After the expected fall of the Assad-regime, many minority groups such as the Kurds, the Assyrians/Aramaeans, Christians, Yazidis, Alawites, Druze, Ismailis or Shiites will not be able to live in a Sunni-Muslim state of Syria,” warned the human rights organization. Radical Islamists are already murdering, kidnapping and driving off members of the religious minorities. If the radical Islamists were to prevail, this would be the end for several Christian communities. According to estimates, there are still 600.000 to 900.000 Christians living in Syria – in contrast to about 1.8 million before the beginning of the civil war in 2011.