QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – For the past three years, Turkey has pushed for the construction of dozens of settlements across areas it occupies in Syria. In late 2022, North Press counted 19 such constructions in the region of Afrin and over 100 across all of Turkish-occupied Syria and Idlib. The latest count features at least 28 settlements in Afrin alone. The Turkish government recently announced that it would build housing units for a million Syrians within the next three years. What explains the rise in settlement construction?
Turkey’s settlements in Syria are particularly concentrated around Jarabulus, al-Bab and Azaz (the so-called ‘Euphrates Shield’ area), where North Press counted 45 settlements in mid-2022, as well as Afrin, which the Turkish army and its proxy forces, the Syrian National Army (SNA), occupied in 2018. The invasion led to the exodus of up to 300,000 Kurdish inhabitants, according to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). Whereas the region was once 97 percent Kurdish, now only one third is, UN statistics show.
In Afrin, dozens of new settlements have sprung up, particularly in the districts of Jinderes (a total of 6 recorded settlements), Afrin (10 settlements), and Sharran (5 settlements). Though gridded and dull, these villages are a far cry from Syria’s IDP camps, featuring central plazas, golden-domed mosques and, occasionally, football pitches. They range in size from a few dozen to 500 single-family homes.
But they are reserved for a select few. Early settlements were built to house the families of SNA fighters, as a report by Syrians for Truth and Justice, a watchdog, demonstrated. This is particularly true for a cluster of settlements in the so-called al-Ahlam Mountain, 3km east of the city of Afrin. Such settlements were approved by the Hatay-based Turkish governor for Afrin, STJ alleges.
Many other settlements, however, have been used to house Arab IDPs from other regions of Syria, who chose to follow the opposition’s retreat into the northwest rather than accept the Syrian government’s spurious peace offers. Afrin’s indigenous Kurds, on the other hand, are excluded from living in these concrete villages.
Turkey has mobilized its state organs to finance the construction of new settlements. Funding has been provided by AFAD, the country’s disaster relief agency, as well as the Turkish Red Crescent, among others. Qatar’s government, too, has pitched in with generous investments. Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations from Palestine, Kuwait, Europe and the US have also provided funding. At least 25 settlements have received foreign funding, North Press’ own statistics show.
Ulterior motives
Turkey’s motives for building these settlements go beyond charity, however. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made no secret of its desire to rid the country of the roughly 3.8 million Syrians living within its borders, who have become deeply unpopular with the Turkish electorate amid a fast-shrinking economy. Settlements in northern Syria offer a way to humanely repatriate them, so the government logic goes.
Last month, Turkey’s former Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, said Turkey and Qatar would build 240,000 extra housing units in under three years to house 1 million refugees currently in Turkey. “5,000 houses will be finished in six months. Within two months, 28,000 more houses will begin construction and we will complete 240,000 houses in a period of two-and-a-half years, three years at the latest,” the minister added. These new settlements will be built between Azaz, east of Afrin region, and Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ain), a city that Turkish forces occupied in 2019.
Ghazwan Kronfol, director of the Syrian Lawyers Association in Turkey, told North Press that the Turkish government’s plan to return a million refugees “is not a new matter, and work has been underway for more than a year to secure funding to establish housing settlements for the returnees.”
He expects the number to grow. “The refugee repatriation plan is a long-term plan,” he continues. “The million is a down payment, at least two million will be deported, so that no more than half a million Syrians will remain in Turkey, including the naturalized.”
Forceful returns of Syrians have already begun. At least 16,173 Syrians were deported through the Bab al-Hawa crossing between Turkey and Idlib, its administration tells North Press. Many more are thought to have been encouraged to leave as their rights in Syria are curtailed. President Erdogan suggested that over half a million Syrians living in Turkey have been voluntarily returned since the first Turkish military invasion in Syria, in 2016.
Huda al-Dairi, an engineer who was displaced from Daraa, in Syria’s south, to Afrin tells North Press that Turkey’s “method of returning refugees is a circumvention of International UN Resolution 2254 and a violation of international human rights law in regards to the obligation of protecting refugees and not forcing them to return to the areas from which they fled as long as the danger from which they fled is still present.”
“No one would accept being returned to a place that is not theirs,” he adds.
Ahmed al-Rajab (name changed), a Syrian engineer living in Turkey, says that the settlements Turkey is financing in Afrin and Azaz are “unsafe and unfit for housing,” calling Turkey’s resettlement plan “nothing but malicious.”
The Turkish government “wants to settle Syrians there and have them forget their homes and lands,” al-Rajab tells North Press. Turkey should “return us to our regions and lands with our dignity intact,” he adds.
Afrin: a special case
But in Afrin, the construction of settlements goes beyond the forceful resettlement of refugees. Here, local human rights organizations have accused Turkey of implementing a policy of demographic engineering through its settlements, similar to Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank. Afrin’s three districts where settlement construction has been most potent – Jinderes, Afrin, and Sharran – also feature some of the highest Arab IDP populations in the region – between 61 and 84 percent. Incidentally, the three regions also form a vital artery connecting the Turkish-held ‘Euphrates Shield’ area with Islamist groups in Idlib.
Afrin’s settlements have doubled as weapons of cultural erasure, by being built on former Yazidi villages (eg. Basma settlement in Afrin; Cooperation Camp in Sharran) or a cemetery of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish defense force (eg. IDP camp near Meshale, Sharran). The settlements, often funded by Islamist NGOs and featuring mosques and madrasas, have imbued the region, which has traditionally been religiously diverse and rejected fundamentalism, with a strong Islamic character.
The February 6 earthquake, which devastated regions of Afrin, has been a godsend for Turkey and its Syrian proxies. A previous North Press report highlighted how Kurds were systematically excluded from aid provisions and disaster relief. Land was confiscated from Afrin’s inhabitants with the excuse of having to establish camps for those affected. On the other hand, existing settlements for Arab IDPs were passed off as newly-built camps for earthquake victims.
The ‘Society for Threatened Peoples‘, a Germany-based human rights organization, wrote at the time that “it is to be feared that Erdogan and his Islamist allies will try to use the reconstruction measures to establish new settlements in order to push back the Kurdish people, their language, and their cultural identity.” North Press identified at least seven settlements in Afrin which opened or began construction after the February earthquake. Turkey and Qatar have promised to carry on the settlement construction in Afrin.
Ibrahim Sheikho, spokesperson of Human Rights Organization-Afrin, a local NGO, talking to North Press, criticized “Turkey’s large-scale demographic change operation in Afrin, in full view of the international community and human rights organizations, through its construction of settlements, which violate international covenants, especially Article 42 of the Hague Regulations of 1907.”
“Turkey wants to perpetuate the policy of demographic change and Turkify the region to be an extension of its region,” Sheikho says, referring to parallel efforts by the Turkish-appointed local councils to erase Afrin’s Kurdish character through Turkish-language schooling and cultural imposition.
Such policies are unlikely to change. Fresh off an election win, Erdogan will want to fully cement his so-called ‘security zone’ on the Turkish-Syrian border. Keeping Afrin minority-Kurdish and firmly under Turkish control will be essential to that end. That can only mean more concrete slabs and continuing violence.