Shock troops and sham legions
The SNA militants and HTS have robbed humanitarian aid convoys. On Feb. 10, Sultan Suleiman Shah, a faction based in Afrin’s Sheikh al-Hadid sub-district, surrounded aid trucks sent by the Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF) with armed men and forced it to hand over their cargo, Afrin Post reported.
On Feb. 14, Jaysh al-Sharqiya, an SNA faction which controls territory around the city of Jindires, assaulted another aid convoy sent by the BCF, stealing the goods it was carrying.
On Feb. 15, HTS seized four trucks of donations sent by civil society organisations and tribes from northeast Syria’s Arab regions. The convoy had been sent to Jindires, but the HTS rerouted it to al-Dana, a town in the Idlib region, which it controls.
A report from Feb. 26 alleged Hamza Division, another SNA faction, has been seizing and selling aid as well.
The SNA factions have also established checkpoints in order to press passing aid convoys to pay fees. In the town of Tel Slore, which connects the border crossing at Bab al-Hawa with Jindires, Faylaq al-Sham (Northern Sector) began charging royalties for every aid truck entering the city.
Armed robbery is only one method the SNA and HTS have employed. Both have also found more creative ways of syphoning off aid to the needy. Multiple sources have told North Press that they have been witness to HTS militiamen presenting themselves as earthquake victims in order to receive aid. North Press also found Jaysh al-Sharqiya, Ahrar al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sharqiya and the Sultan Suleiman Shah Division involved in similar schemes. “The SNA factions force the NGOs operating in the region to reserve more than 100 shares of each type of aid sent to the affected people in Jindires of Afrin countryside to be delivered to its militants later,” a source in Jindires explained . The aid is later sold in towns under their control at a hefty mark-up.
North Press found an Ahrar al-Sharqiya commander registering his militants as victims with the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Response Agency (AFAD) in Jindires under false names. According to one source, each family receives a cash voucher worth $150. The commander has registered 180 fictitious families so far.
In another instance, Sultan Muhammad al-Fateh, a smaller SNA faction operating out of the Sheikh al-Hadid sub-district in Afrin stole 29 emergency relief tents, which were sold for $200-300 each.
“The aid that reaches Jindires can cover the needs of dozens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people, but the affected people receive only a little,” a local told North Press.
“Dozens” of houses have been occupied or stolen by SNA militiamen after civilians fled in the wake of the earthquake. A majority of the victims are Kurdish.
In the town of Baadina, in the sub-district of Rajo, the militants occupied houses in order to present themselves as quake victims in need of compensation. In Jindires, the Sultan Suleiman Shah militia began identifying collapsed houses owned by wealthy inhabitants in order to sack them.
Possibly the most imaginative of all schemes has been the proliferation of fake IDP camps throughout the Afrin region. These are built by SNA militias with the express purpose of directing NGO funds and material aid to them. At least one Kurdish resident in town of Jalame, southeast Jindires, rejected a generous offer by militiamen to erect such a camp on their lands, in fear that they might lose access to these grounds forever.
The ransacking of humanitarian aid has also increased violence in the region, as militias compete for a piece of the cake. Tensions between HTS and Jaysh al-Sharqiya grew as the latter prevented the al-Qaeda spinoff from taking control of an aid convoy. HTS later began erecting checkpoints around Jindires in order to control the flow of aid.
On Feb. 25, HTS took control of a position near Kafr Jenna, on the critical artery road connecting the city of Azaz with Turkish-occupied Afrin. It pulled back only after widespread mobilization by SNA militias.
Afrin’s local councils – puppet administrations which Turkey established after occupying the region in 2018 – have been powerless to stop the barrage of criminal activity. In fact, some reports suggest that local councils may have been among the disaster profiteers.
The local council in Jindires reportedly prohibited residents from removing the debris caused by the earthquake without an official permit and a payment of a $100 fee.
The ‘relief office’ at the Afrin city local council, in cooperation with a corrupt AFAD official have sold over a thousand tents to private resellers at a price of 700 Turkish lira ($37) per item, Afrin Post claims.