Forgotten Kurd

[Gabby Dreher]

Itis, unfortunately, unlikely that Trump will ever stand trial but, if he does, then his complicity in the ethnic cleansing of the Syrian Kurds should top the charge sheet. This was an act of evil in itself and also the betrayal of an ally since American-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters had led the counter-attack against Isis, closing in on its last strongholds just as Turkey invaded Afrin.

I wrote much about the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds from their homes in northern Syria by Turkey in two separate invasions in 2018 and 2019, but without any noticeable result. It soon became impossible for independent reporters to visit Afrin or the Turkish-occupied zone around the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain. But I was finally able to make contact last week via the internet with an eyewitness in Afrin who gives a grim but compelling account of her personal experience of ethnic cleansing.

She returned to Afrin City where her house had been looted and where she is now trapped. She says that Turkish-backed Syrian jihadi militias shoot anybody trying to leave: "A friend of mine was killed with her 10-year-old child last year while trying to flee." At the same time, the militiamen make it impossible for Kurds to stay.

As one of the few Kurds remaining in her old neighbourhood where the houses have been taken over by Arabic-speaking jihadis and their families, she does not dare speak Kurdish in the street. She has found that the Turkish army considers all Kurds to be "terrorists", but that the militiamen are even more dangerous, regarding "Kurds as pagans, disbelievers who should be killed on orders from God."

Rohilat had no alternative but to put on a Hijab, which Kurdish women normally do not wear. She did not do so for seven months but was harassed and intimidated by jihadi neighbours from other parts of Syria. She appealed to a Turkish officer, but he said that she should respect the social norms in her neighbourhood. "So I had to put on the Hijab," she said. "My children laughed at me and mocked me at the beginning, but they have got used to the situation."

The surviving Kurds in Afrin are defenceless and are preyed on by roving militiamen. When going to the market earlier this week, Rohilat saw two Kurdish girls walking in the same direction. Two militiamen with guns on a motorcycle cruised slowly beside them. "Suddenly the motorcycle came close to the girls and the militiamen sitting on the back grabbed the breast of one of them," says Rohilat. Both girls started crying. The militiamen got off their motorcycle and started kissing them and fondling their breasts, only leaving them when a crowd gathered and Rohilat took the girls to her home.

On another occasion, she was buying bread in the market, when she saw an Islamist gunman tell a Kurd working in a restaurant to leave the city. When he protested, saying he had nowhere else to go, the militiaman slapped him across the face and said: "You Kurds are pagans and disbelievers in God [though the Kurds are almost all Sunni Muslims]."

In the two formerly Kurdish zones in Syria, the cutting edge of the Turkish occupation is Arab militiamen, who are mostly jihadis from elsewhere in Syria. The Kurds in Afrin were largely farmers, cultivating fruit and vegetables and, above all, olives. But Rohilat says that the new settlers are city people "so they cut down the olive trees and sell them as firewood". As a result, foodstuffs have to be imported and are sold at a higher price.

By turning over on the ground control of Kurdish populated areas to anti-Kurdish Islamist gunmen, the Turkish government ensures ethnic cleansing, but without appearing to be directly responsible. Until recently, the militiamen were paid $100 a month by Turkey, but they could supplement this by looting and confiscating Kurdish property while the Turkish army allegedly turned a blind eye.

Aside from the chronic insecurity, Rohilat has to cope with the rapid spread of coronavirus in Afrin since August. She herself has contracted the illness, having tested positive at a Turkish medical facility, but says she and many others will not go to a military hospital for treatment because few people who do go return alive. Instead, they stay at home, taking paracetamol and eating lentil and onion soup. She herself cannot afford to buy face masks, and can only buy bread because her children do odd jobs in the market and relatives in Turkey send her a little money every couple of months.

Grim though life is for Rohilat, she is one of the survivors while other Kurds have fled, live in insanitary camps, been killed, held for ransom or have simply disappeared. Nor is the Turkish campaign against the 3 million Syrian Kurds likely to de-escalate; on the contrary, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch another invasion that would in practice finish the job of cleansing the Kurdish population.

One piece of good news is that the replacement of Trump by Joe Biden significantly reduces, though it does not eliminate, the chances of the US greenlighting another Turkish incursion. As Trump and his poisonous crew depart, it should never be forgotten or forgiven that his manic policy in Syria inflicted endless misery on great numbers of people who once led happy lives.

In Middle East, where we often heard about sectarians conflicts, dictatorships and intolerance, the project which has started from the Kurds, is the only one in the area which thinks materially to a peaceful solution for whole the different populations in its own main ideas.

Document the situation of the Kurds in territories where they live (Iraq,Iran, Turkey and Syria) means give them the possibility to show how difficult is their own situation, forgotten by the whole world. I mostly try to remind that there is a population who live thanks to solidarity links, visible for example between refugees from the war zone of Rojava and the other kurds in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, which means that there is still an important fortress of hope inside the terrifying theater of the perpetual war.

Two decades later, still suffering the long-term effects of chemical agents, many of the 100,000 Iranian survivors of Iraqi gas attacks continue to seek justice as they follow the trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

They are described by many as forgotten victims of Saddam Hussein. In many cases, they are soldiers who fought in the bloody Iran-Iraq war in 1980-88. But many others were noncombatants.

Iranian authorities have registered more than 50,000 victims of chemical weapons requiring special medical care. But it is thought that about 1 million Iranians were exposed to mustard or nerve gas during the war.

Hossein Mohammadian, a resident of Sardasht in Iran's Kurdistan, is among those victims.

'A Special Smell'

Sardasht came under chemical attack months before the March 1988 attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, which became a symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality. But Sardasht received scant media coverage, and was soon forgotten by many.

But Mohammadian has vivid memories of that hot afternoon in late-June 1987.

"It was not the first time Sardasht was being attacked, but the difference was -- and it became clear later -- that it was a chemical attack," he says. "Some of the bombs fell only a few meters from me. I thought our house was destroyed and my parents were under the rubble. I started running toward the house, when I realized there was thick smoke in the air and a special smell."

Several mustard bombs were dropped on the city, contaminating some 4,500 people. More than 100 people died in the first month after exposure.

Mohammadian says neighbors began coughing and suffering from blisters. Some vomited, while others could barely open their burning eyes.

Eleven members of his family were seriously contaminated. Mohammadian was in such a critical state that he was transferred to a hospital in Tehran, and then Madrid, for treatment. He learned of his father's death only two months after the attack.

Lifetime Of Pain

Mohammadian, now 46, is a senior member of a nongovernmental group that tries to help Sardasht's victims of chemical weapons. He tells RFE/RL that the city still bears the scars of that attack nearly 20 years ago.

"Many people have problems, including respiratory difficulties and weak nerves -- their immune systems have become weak," Mohammadian says. "The reality is that [scientists] have not yet found a guaranteed cure for these victims."

A screen capture from Iraqi television of UN personnel destroying mustard gas in the early 1990s (AFP)

WHAT IS GOING ON? On March 8, RFE/RL's Washington office hosted a roundtable discussion on relations between Iraq and Iran. Although most analysts agree that Iran has been actively involved in Iraq since the U.S.-led military operation to oust former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, they continue to debate the nature, extent, and intent of that involvement.

The RFE/RL briefing featured WAYNE WHITE, former deputy director of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research's Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, and A. WILLIAM SAMII, RFE/RL's regional analyst for Iran and editor of the "RFE/RL Iran Report."

A heart surgeon by training, reformist Pezeshkian is a former health minister and multiterm lawmaker who was elected president earlier this month in a snap election held after the death of hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May.

The first round of voting on June 28 had voter participation of 39 percent -- a record-low turnout for a presidential election in the history of the Islamic republic. The runoff vote on July 5, which saw Pezeshkian face off against ultraconservative candidate Saeed Jalili, saw the turnout rise to around 49 percent.

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