Turkish-backed militia kidnapped, killed Kurdish girl in Syria’s Afrin

AFRIN, Syria (North Press) – A Kurdish girl from the Afrin region of Syria was found dead among agricultural fields east of Azaz city on Saturday morning after she was kidnapped by Turkish-backed armed groups two weeks ago.

“The body of the girl, 16-year-old Malik Nabih Khalil Jumah from the village of Darwish in the Afrin region, was found in agricultural lands near the village of al-Firiziyah east of Azaz,” Hayhan Ali of the Human Rights Organization in Afrin told North Press.

"At first the information about the identity of the murdered girl was contradictory, but after we got in touch with the girl’s relatives in Darwish village in Afrin, we confirmed the accuracy of this information." Ali said.

The Human Rights Organization in Afrin later published on its Facebook on Sunday morning, that members of the elite unit of the Turkish-backed armed group Sultan Murad kidnapped the girl at dawn on the Eid day on May 23, 2020 with a van.

The girl was engaged to a relative from the village of Jalama in the Jinderes district even though she was a minor, for fear of her family being forced to marry her off to a member of the armed group.

Media pages affiliated with the opposition's Syrian National Coalition published that the murdered girl was previously working for Autonomous Administration, raising doubts about a tendency to justify the armed group that are committing such violations and crimes.

“Turkish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups kidnapped, from 18 March 2018 until the end of last May,  6,420 people in the Afrin region, while the fate of 3,500 civilians is still unknown,” the Violations Documentation Center in northern Syria said last week.

"Women and girls belonging to Kurdish and Yazidi minorities in Afrin suffer from restricted movement and have been subjected to harassment, and this must be ended," said a report published by the International Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry on Syria on March 2, 2020.