Afrin is a Kurdish-majority region in northwest Syria. It came under the control of Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) nearly a decade ago when regime forces withdrew from the area in order to fight rebel forces after conflict broke out in 2011.
The region witnessed none of the violence that raged throughout the country until January 2018, when Turkey and its Syrian proxies launched Operation Olive Branch against the YPG. Turkish forces entered Afrin city on March 18 and had full control of the region six days later.
Scores of civilians and members of local security forces – YPG, Asayish, and volunteers – were killed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled to Kurdish-held areas, particularly the nearby area of Shahba – an enclave still under the control of YPG despite being surrounded by pro-Turkey and regime forces.
Turkey was accused of not taking necessary precautions to avoid civilian deaths during the conflict and militias Ankara backs, the Syrian National Army (SNA), have been accused of committing serious violations in Afrin and other areas they control, including desecrating graves of minorities such as Yazidis. The United Nations has called on Turkey to rein in its proxies and prevent violations in areas it controls.
During the offensive, concerns were raised that the YPG were preventing civilians from leaving Afrin. "Civilians on the ground have expressed serious worries to us regarding their safety, including as a result of fighters placing rocket launchers in residential areas. We are deeply concerned about the high risk of civilians – who are effectively trapped – being killed, injured, besieged, used as human shields or displaced as a result of the fighting," said a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
‘War crime’
More than three years after it invaded Afrin, Turkey claimed last week that they and local authorities had found the bodies of 61 civilians in a mass grave and accused the YPG of killing them.
Rahmi Dogan, governor of the southern Turkish province of Hatay, which borders Afrin, said on Wednesday they had found 35 bodies in an area of Afrin after receiving information that the YPG had buried mass remains in unused land in January 2018.
"We announced the numbers yesterday. It was 35, but as of the morning, the number increased to 61 and the excavation work still continues," he said the next day at a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the 2016 failed coup in Turkey.
Turkey’s Defense Ministry described the graves as “another war crime of the terrorist organization PKK/YPG.”
Ankara claims that YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – an armed group fighting for the increased rights of Kurds in Turkey. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey. The YPG denies the link.
Turkey sees both groups as a threat to its national security and has conducted military operations against the PKK and its alleged proxies at home in Turkey as well as across the borders in both Syria and the Kurdistan Region.
‘Crimes against humanity’
Kurdish forces in northeast Syria (Rojava) denied Ankara’s claim, saying the bodies buried in the Afrin grave are civilians and members of security forces who were killed while resisting the Turkish invasion in 2018.
“Turkish occupation forces are making false claims a cemetery of YPG martyrs who fell in the defense of Afrin during the invasion is a 'mass grave',” said Mazloum Abdi, general commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes the YPG.
He called on the international community “to investigate Turkish and militia crimes in Afrin and stop crimes against humanity.”
The SDF is the main ally of the US-led global coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS) on the ground in Syria.
YPG spokesperson Nuri Mahmoud released a 12-minute video about the grave site and he accused Turkey of fabricating reports to smear the ambitions of Rojava, which wants international recognition for its administration and allies that control about a quarter of the country.
“The people of Afrin built a cemetery next to the Avrin hospital in Afrin in the last days of war and buried the bodies of nearly 71 martyrs – fighters and civilians – who had been killed due to intense and indiscriminate Turkish bombardment targeting the city center. Those people were killed by Turkish attacks in the district of Mahmoudiya and next to the hospital,” Mahmoud said.
They were unable to bury the dead in cemeteries due to shelling, he added.
He showed footage of the site in 2018 and 2021 and said the makeshift cemetery contained 71 bodies, but the identities of only 40 of them are known. Just five of the identified bodies belong to civilians, the rest are members of security forces.
The cemetery was built in March 2018 after the city was besieged by the Turkish army and its proxies, “therefore, no one could transport the dead bodies outside Afrin,” Ibrahim Shekho, spokesperson for the Human Rights Organization Afrin-Syria, told Rudaw.
The rights group, which is based in SDF-held areas but monitors violations in Afrin through local volunteers, said on Sunday that thousands of graves of Kurdish fighters in three major cemeteries in Afrin have been “desecrated” by Turkey since March 2018, turned into settlements and markets for selling livestock. It called on the United Nations to send a fact-finding team to the site.
An eyewitness, who used to be a health worker before the Turkish invasion and still resides in Afrin, also told Rudaw that they created the makeshift grave site because of Turkish shelling on the city’s cemeteries.
“They dug that land and buried them all. Most of them were victims of war,” the eyewitness said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Another source, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, had attended a funeral at the site and said around 40 people were buried there, including members of the security forces, in marked graves.
He also said that on March 16, two days before the Turkish army and its proxies entered Afrin, Kurdish authorities took the bodies of 30 of their dead with them as they fled the city, “fearing that the open land could be subjected to bombardment.”
Local authorities in Afrin, supervised by Turkey, have told reporters that what was found last week was not a mass grave but an informal cemetery built by the SDF.
Photos published in Turkish media of the purported mass grave and images shared by Kurdish forces of the 2018 cemetery appear to show the same location.
Additional reporting by Hussein Omar
