The source, who spoke to Rudaw on the condition of anonymity, alleges a Turkish-backed Syrian rebel group known as Hemzat logged the trees.
“On the 11th of this month, around 50 to 60 olive trees of a Kurdish local in the village of Meydanke were logged by fighters of Hemzat group,” the source said.
Video footage sent to Rudaw by Afrin locals shows partially-cut olive trees in a field. The region is a heavy olive producer, but following the Turkish operations to the area in 2018, many of the olive fields were seized by Turkish backed groups.
“The olive season is very important in our history and for our people, every year they wait for that season to come because their livelihood depends on these olive trees,” Hanif Rashid, an agriculture engineer from Afrin, told Rudaw.
“The Turkish occupation and their proxies cut off the olive trees and sell them without any ethics or sympathy and deal a large blow to the people.” he said. “The people depend on these trees and some of them age more than 60 to 70 years.”
Afrin is a Kurdish-majority region in Syria’s northwest. The People’s Protection Units (YPG) took control of the area after regime forces re-deployed to defend Arab-majority areas against rebels at the start of the uprising in 2011. In 2018, Turkey and its allied Syrian militias seized control of Afrin, forcefully displacing much of the local population.
The Kurdish population fell by more than 60 percent in only the first two years of the invasion, according to Afrin’s 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 U.N. estimates, upwards of 150,000 Kurds have been displaced, most of them displaced to Shahba camp in Tel Rifaat, north of Aleppo.
Additional reporting by Dilan Sirwan
