SDF demands investigation into exhumation of cemetery in Syria’s Afrin
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – The Public Relations Office of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) called on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic to open an urgent investigation and send a special mission to discover the location of the cemetery that was recently exhumed by Turkey in the city of Afrin, northwest Syria.
This came in a statement the office addressed to the head of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic and the head of the committee’s general secretariat, in which it demanded that DNA tests be conducted and that the testimonies of the victims’ families be heard.
In mid-July, the Turkish Anadolu Agency published pictures of corpses exhumed from a cemetery, claiming that it was a mass grave containing victims of the SDF.
The cemetery, according to local sources, was in fact hastily created by the Afrin local administration near Afrin Hospital under the name “Afrin Martyrs’ Cemetery” during the Turkish forces’ attack on the area in January 2018.
The region’s administration was unable at the time to transfer the bodies to official cemeteries outside the city due to “hostile military actions and intense bombing of the city.”
The statement also called for sending the families of the victims or a delegation to act on their behalf, with international guarantees and protection, to inspect the bodies and move them or bury them “respectfully in a new cemetery, according to their customs and traditions, and to put the tombstones on the graves of their children.”
According to the statement, the SDF have records of some of the civilian and military victims who were buried in the cemetery.
In its statement, the Syrian Democratic Forces demanded “the condemnation of Turkey, the affiliated opposition factions, and all those who participated in this act contrary to morals and human values and violating human rights.”