Over 580 arrested by Turkish backed Syrian proxies in Afrin in 2021: monitor

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Over 580 people were arrested in the city of Afrin in northern Syria in 2021 mostly for political reasons, including cases where the victims were arrested for the “simple fact that they were Kurds”, a Syrian monitor group said on Tuesday, adding that arrests were carried out by Turkish-backed Syrian proxies in the region.

The human rights monitoring organization Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) said that they had documented the arrest of 584 people in the Kurdish majority city of Afrin, including 46 women and 16 teenagers over the past year. They added that they have recorded the release of only 123 of those people, and the death of at least one.

“STJ thoroughly analyzed the cases, concluding that perpetrators carried out arrests mostly for political reasons, including cases where victims were arrested for the simple fact that they were Kurds,” the STJ report read, stating that in other cases “perpetrators were motivated by plans for demographic-change, where they used detentions and the threat of detention to scare indigenous communities into leaving their homes.”

Thousands of indigenous Kurds were forced to flee Afrin when Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies launched Operation Olive Branch on January 20, 2018. By the time Ankara had seized control of the city from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) on March 24, tens of thousands of Kurds had fled, many of them to Kurdish-controlled areas in northeast Syria (Rojava).

The Kurdish population fell by more than 60 percent in only the first two years of the invasion, according to the Afrin-based Human Rights Organization. “According to the latest statistics that we received, the size of the indigenous population of Kurds in the Afrin region reached 34.8 percent in January, while they previously made up 97 percent of the population,” reads a statement from the organization published in April 2020.

According to UN estimates, upwards of 150,000 Kurds have been displaced, most of them to Shahba camp in Tel Rifaat, north of Aleppo.

“The 584 detentions recorded in the report include only those detainees who were arrested and then relocated to detention centers supervised by security apparatuses like the Military Police. STJ identified that the groups making the arrests are chiefly armed opposition groups that maintain control over Afrin’s villages and towns,” STJ said in the report, adding that they believe the actual number of detainees is likely greater.

Turkish-backed groups have been widely accused of human rights violations against Afrin’s locals, including kidnap, looting and extortion.

Accusations in the area, including land theft, have increased since the invasion, dubbed Operation Olive Branch. Human rights groups and the United Nations have published reports detailing arbitrary arrests, detention and pillaging, among other violations.

In August 2018, Amnesty International reported that “Afrin residents are enduring widespread human rights violations, mostly at the hands of Syrian armed groups equipped and armed by Turkey.”

In its annual report for 2019, Amnesty documented a “wide range of abuses” against Afrin’s civilians at the hands of Turkish-backed groups, including the arbitrary detention of more than 50 locals.