ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkey is responsible for an array of “serious abuses and potential war crimes” committed by Turkish forces and proxy militias in areas it occupies in northern Syria, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report said on Thursday. Kurds have borne the brunt of the abuses.
Turkey “bears responsibility for the serious abuses and potential war crimes committed by members of its forces and local armed groups it supports in Turkish-occupied territories of northern Syria,” HRW said in the report.
Ankara has carried out successive operations since 2016 to expel Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), from Syria’s north. Its military campaigns are aimed at establishing a “safe zone” - a buffer between the Turkey-Syria border and areas under Kurdish control.
“Kurdish residents have borne the brunt of the abuses due to their perceived ties to Kurdish-led forces that control vast swathes of northeast Syria,” HRW said, with Ankara alleging that Kurdish forces in northeast Syria (Rojava) are a front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish group engaged in a decades-long conflict with Turkey.
Turkish and Turkish-backed forces have routinely been accused of committing grave human rights violations, killings, and abductions as well as forcing the displacement of Kurds from northern Syria.
According to HRW, the Turkish Armed Forces and intelligence agencies “were involved in carrying out and overseeing abuses.”
“Turkish officials are not merely bystanders to abuses, but bear responsibility as the occupying power, and in some cases have been directly involved in apparent war crimes,” said Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at HRW.
Other violations documented by HRW include housing, land, and property rights, and “widespread looting and pillaging as well as property seizures and extortion, and the failure of attempted accountability measures to curb abuses or to provide restitution to victims.”
While Kurds have been disproportionately targeted by Turkish forces and their affiliates, Arabs and others with ties to the SDF have also been affected.
“Kurdish women detainees have reported sexual violence, including rape. Children as young as six months old have been detained alongside their mothers,” the report highlights.
The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), a loose coalition of militias affiliated with Turkey, as well as the military police, “have arbitrarily arrested and detained, forcibly disappeared, tortured and otherwise ill-treated, and subjected to unfair military trials scores of people with impunity,” HRW said.
Since 2016, Turkey has carried out three offensives against the YPG in northern Syria, invading key Kurdish-majority towns near the border such as Afrin, Sari Kani (Ras al-Ain), and Gire Spi (Tal Abyad). It has repeatedly threatened to carry out another operation imminently.
A Syrian resident who formerly lived under SNA rule told HRW that “everything is by the power of the weapon.”
In 2018, Turkey and its Syrian proxies launched Operation Olive Branch with the aim of capturing Afrin from the YPG.
Local and international rights groups have repeatedly accused pro-Turkey groups of committing human rights abuses against the Kurdish residents of the city since its fall in 2018.
Hundreds of thousands of residents of the Syria-Turkey border strip towns of Sari Kani and Gire Spi have been displaced from their homes, the report said.
“The hardest thing for me was standing in front of my house and not being able to enter it,” said a displaced Yazidi man from Sari Kani.
Officials responsible for grave human rights abuses in Turkish-controlled territories of northern Syria, some of which hold high-ranking positions within SNA, have yet to be prosecuted, HRW lamented.
The rights group noted two email inquiries about the abuses sent to Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in November 2023 and January 2024 have gone unanswered.
“Turkey’s occupation of parts of northern Syria has facilitated a lawless climate of abuse and impunity – it’s the furthest thing possible from a ‘safe zone,’” Coogle said.
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