QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Nearly three weeks since the deadly Feb. 6 earthquake, hardly a day has passed without new allegations of crimes committed by the ruling Turkish-backed armed factions of Afrin, a historically Kurdish region in northwest Syria.
The reported crimes – which include stealing humanitarian aid and forcefully displacing residents – are nothing new. Nor is the fact that violations appear to unduly target Kurds. However, increasingly, observers have accused local militias and their Turkish patron of using the earthquake as a cover to ramp up their demographic engineering project in the region.
Jinderes: bruised, then battered
The worst-hit of this historically-Kurdish territory is the town of Jindires, where a preliminary UN study said 228 buildings were damaged, and 318 were “potentially damaged” by the earthquake. The local Turkish-controlled council puts the figure at 278 buildings destroyed and 1.110 others damaged. At least 1.376 people have been killed; many more have been displaced.
Jindires, like the rest of Afrin region, was predominantly Kurdish before the Syrian War. In the years leading up to 2018, its population swelled with Arab refugees fleeing the violence in Aleppo and Idlib. When Turkey and Turkish-backed armed opposition factions, branded the ‘Syrian National Army’ (SNA), invaded the region in 2018, most of the population was displaced. Only about a third of the people of Jindires ever returned. Turkey re-settled the region with Arabs fleeing the advances of the Syrian government throughout the country.
Today, the Kurds in Jindires – which has a population of about 46.000 – are a minority. The UN classifies 87 percent of its population as IDPs – that is, Arab settlers. Afrin Post, a local news organization, reports that only 309 of the 1.376 victims of the earthquake were “original inhabitants”.
Since its occupation in 2018, the region of Jindires has been under the control of a variety of SNA factions. The mountainous northwest has been the home of Sultan Suleiman Shah Division; the flat valley to its south, including the town of Jindires, has been controlled by Ahrar al-Sharqiya; its eastern flank is taken by Hamza Division. A number of other Turkish-backed groups are also present in the region, such as Ahrar al-Sham, Faylaq al-Majd, Faylaq al-Sham (Northern Sector), and Jaysh al-Sharqiya.
These factions have increasingly made way for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS – formerly al-Nusra Front), an al-Qaida-linked faction which rules the Idlib region, south of Jindires. In the autumn of 2022, HTS briefly took control of Jindires before taking the city of Afrin, too. Despite their apparent pull-out days later, Jindires has continued to be within HTS’ sphere of influence. Many observers believe Turkey is working towards a full HTS take-over of the region.
The SNA factions and HTS have long terrorized the Afrin region. The Turkish forces have been unable – or unwilling – to put an end to daily human rights violations, particularly against its indigenous Kurdish population. Attacks by SNA militants and Turkish forces against civilians have been particularly potent in the Jindires region. Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), a local human rights group, says the region has seen the most unlawful arrests out of any sub-districts in their latest report on Afrin (the arrest numbers do not correlate with population size).
Set up for failure
In light of this reality, the failure of local authorities to help those most in need after the Feb. earthquake can hardly come as a surprise. Allegations of abuse abound. Though at least 50 NGOs – some say as many as 100 – are on the ground in Jindires, providing dozens of tons of aid, many locals are left behind. “More than 80 percent of aid does not reach people,” an IDP living in Jindires told North Press.
The SNA factions, at Turkey’s direction, have prevented aid from reaching the earthquake-afflicted regions under its control. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) sent 30 fuel trucks and three trucks laden with relief aid to the northwest. After nine days waiting at an internal border with the SNA, they were forced to turn around.
A report by STJ alleges that the SNA militants pleaded with Turkish authorities to let them pass, given the disastrous situation on the ground – to no avail. A relief worker told STJ, “Northwestern Syria was cut off from the rest of the world and received nothing but dead bodies from Turkey over the first five days.”
Outside of Turkey and Qatar, which were already present in the region before the earthquake, only two foreign NGOs were able to reach Jindires in the first days after the earthquake: one connected to the Saudi Arabian royal family, and the Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF), run by the ruling authority in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Both have had their aid confiscated by the SNA factions.