North-Press Agency
Nour al-Din Ahmad
Recently, Turkey set up a new wall in the Afrin region in northwest Syria, up to 600 meters further into Syria from the old border wall. According to observers, this is a warning that Turkey is trying to draw new borders in this region, with fears that Turkey will annex strategic and elevated places in Afrin.
On the 18th of March, 2018, and since its use of Syrian opposition groups to take over Afrin, Turkey has been seeking to carry out demographic change in the region by committing violations against the region’s residents. It brings Syrian IDPs to Afrin, and 2,200 people are still in the prisons of Turkish-backed armed groups in the northern countryside of Aleppo, the majority of whose fate is unknown, according to human rights reports.
Politicians from the region point to fears of a repeat of the Liwa Iskenderun scenario, in which Turkey annexed the Iskenderun region in 1939 after it was decided to have been a part of Syrian territory in accordance with previous agreements. The politicians' view stems from the great military mobilization that Turkey sent to Afrin as well as the projects of demographic change that it implemented there.
Since the 17th of last March, Turkey began the establishment of a new wall at a distance of between 50 and 600 meters inside Syrian territory. The newly constructed wall is far from the old one, with varying distances from one area to another, and local sources told North-Press that the wall was built along the border of the entire Afrin region.
A private source close to the armed opposition groups in Afrin, who asked not to be identified, said that Turkey is doing this to move the borders away from the nearby outposts on its side to prevent them from being targeted by ground forces.
The source, who was not sure whether or not the new wall might mean the annexation of villages to Turkey, said: "A day ago I was near the border, and I did not see any villages behind the wall in the area I wandered. However, I don't know if it included villages in other areas."
"There seems to be a plan to draw new borders in Afrin. Turkey considers this region border campus, and believes it has the right to control it and annex it to Turkey. As it has decided before, no resident has the right to build houses and grow trees there." Amina Misto, a journalist from the city of Afrin, said.
In an interview with North-Press, Amina Misto added that Turkey cut down hundreds of olive trees to draw these new borders. “Nearly 500 olive trees were cut down between the villages of Korda and Shankila,” which are located in the Bulbul district in the northern countryside of Afrin.
Misto pointed out that there are serious concerns about annexing villages, especially in the Jinderis district, where there are villages attached to the borders, such as Hamam, and that the strategic height of Jabal Ghar in Afrin is not far from the border.
The Kurdish journalist quoted local anonymous sources as saying: "The wall divided Sheikh Hamza's cemetery between the villages of Zaara and Ali Karou into two halves, while hundreds of olive trees remained behind the new wall."