Kurds Say Turkey Plans to Reshape Demographics in Northern Syria

Voice of America News



Kurds Say Turkey Plans to Reshape Demographics in Northern Syria

by Jamie Dettmer
 11:47 AM


Turkey's latest military incursion into northern Syria which it says
is aimed at reining in Kurdish separatists will speed up the return of
Syrian refugees to their homes, Turkish officials say. But Kurds are
fearful Ankara plans to use the returnees to displace them and
engineer a population shift.

Kurd officials say Ankara wants to re-shape the demographics of the
borderlands in a bid to establish a "corridor of stability" populated
by fewer Kurds and with Sunni Arab refugees currently in Turkey taking
their place.

That would weaken the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which
Ankara dubs an affiliate of Turkey's outlawed Kurdish separatists, the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Kurdish political activists and YPG propagandists have been mounting a
Twitter and social media campaign highlighting the danger, claiming
"ethnic cleansing" is one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's key war
aims in the offensive, which is now in its second week, and named
Operation Olive Branch.

Fear of ethnic cleansing

Former U.S. officials have also expressed alarm. Michael Rubin, a
former Pentagon adviser and currently an analyst at the American
Enterprise Institute, says, "What Turkey seeks to do in Afrin is not
eradicate terrorism, but rather to engage in ethnic cleansing."

Former U.S. envoy Alberto Fernandez picked up on remarks made last
week by Erdogan in which he talked of settling Syrian refugees in the
Kurdish enclave of Afrin, which is bearing the brunt of Turkey's
operation.

In a tweet, Fernandez warned, "If true, this would mean the ethnic
cleansing of #Afrin right before our eyes is looming."

Turkish officials dismiss the claim they intend to reorder ethnic
populations in northern Syria. But they say they expect once the
Turkish military offensive has secured territory that tens of
thousands of Syrian refugees will flood back to their homes, much as
thousands did in the wake of the 2016 Turkish incursion northeast of
Aleppo.

Turkey is hosting more than three million Syrian war refugees.

Thousands are fleeing Afrin or trying to. U.N. officials say flight is
being restricted not only by the hostilities, including continuous
shelling, but also by local Kurdish authorities, who closed exit
points between the enclave and Syria government-held areas in Aleppo
province. Syrian soldiers have also been reported to have sent some
refugees back.

Erdogan has prompted the rising alarm about a planned mass population
displacement. On January 24 he told a meeting in the presidential
complex in Turkey's capital Ankara that one goal of Operation Olive
Branch is to return Afrin to its "rightful owners."

"First, we will wipe out the terrorists and then make the place
livable. For whom? For 3.5 million Syrians who are our guests. We
cannot forever house them in tents," he said. He dismissed the idea
that Afrin is a Kurdish enclave. "In Afrin, 55 percent are Arabs, 35
percent are Kurds and the rest are Turkmens." That may be the case now
as the population has been swollen by thousands of refugees, the
majority Arabs.

But traditionally Afrin has been seen as Kurdish territory, with a
peppering of other minorities, including Turkmens, Alawite Kurds,
Yazidi Kurds and with some Armenians and Circassians, say analysts.

Yazidi activists last week urged the United Nations to protect their
21 villages in the Afrin pocket, saying they are at serious risk
because of Turkey's military operation. A Yazidi advocacy group,
Yazda, warned they will hold Turkey and Syrian rebel militias fighting
alongside the Turks, responsible "if any persecution of cleansing
takes place against our people."

Population displacements

All sides in the vicious Syrian war, with its seemingly endless cycles
of sectarian and ethnic revenge, have engaged in war crimes and
population displacements. That includes the Kurds, who rights groups
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accuse the of forceful
displacement and razing Arab villages, prompting fierce Kurdish
denials.

But VOA interviewed dozens of Arab residents from a string of
traditionally Sunni Arab villages east of Afrin, including Tell
Rifaat, who say the YPG blocked them from returning home after the
Kurds seized the territory as a Russian-backed Syrian government
offensive against the rebels was underway in 2016.

Population displacements have long been employed by the region's
rulers to shape demographics to suit their purposes. Syrian autocrat
Hafez al-Assad shifted populations around for collective punishment as
well as for strategic reasons, including moving Arabs into Kurdish
territory in northeast Syria. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did the
same during his 24-year rule. Historically the Ottomans, along with
Russia's Stalin, have been responsible for some of the biggest
forcible ethnic displacements.