Forgotten 2017 Kurdish

[Giraldo Allain]

InMiddle 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.

It is, 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.

The war in Yemen has long been described as hidden or forgotten. It has been going on, however, for over three years and it immediately generated a large-scale humanitarian crisis, described by international humanitarian agencies as the worst in the contemporary world. The cholera epidemic that gripped a million Yemenites in 2017 is one of the indications, but the figures circulating on the humanitarian situation are sometimes difficult to grasp and are actually generally unknown. Thus, the UN usually refers to 10,000 deaths caused by the war, but this estimate, generally repeated by the media and in reports, is very certainly under the mark, since the figure dates back to the summer of 2016. All of them have thus ceased to keep the macabre count.

In fact, the conflict, which began in March 2015, long remained under the media radars. This could at first be ascribed to the difficulties foreign journalists had in gaining access to the terrain. International media sending reporters were very rare during the first two years of the war. Those who did go met with the express desire by all parties involved to control the images and stories.

In any case, the entrenchment of the war has gradually led to a certain awareness. Describing the conflict in Yemen as hidden is certainly now slightly exaggerated. In 2017, coverage of the crisis in Western media improved considerably, even if still unsatisfactory. A growing number of foreign reporters have been able, though under difficult, if not outrageous conditions, to cover the conflict from Aden, or more rarely by travelling to Sanaa, an area held by the rebels.

The structure of the conflict, marked by confessionalization dynamics similar to those observed in Syria and Iraq, also fosters jihadist groups. The latter have developed a territorial base in the country. Recall that it was the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida that claimed authorship for the January 2015 attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris. These armed groups directly benefit from the situation of chaos and the collapse of State structures encouraged by the conflict. In addition, designating the Houthis as Shiite heretics associated with Iran legitimizes the confessionally-based propaganda of jihadi actors. Thus, for instance, the Organization of the Islamic State, in competition with al-Qaeda, has emerged in this context of war and has been carrying out activities in the southern provinces. It particularly targets government leaders but has also deployed openly anti-Shiite violence, attacking mosques, for example. Although the jihadis have continued to be the targets of US drones since the beginning of the conflict and some of their leaders have been eliminated, at the same time, these movements have become established among the population in a context imbued with violence. Many Salafist combatants, though not necessarily directly affiliated with any transnational jihadi organization, have also been co-opted by the coalition into the war effort against the Houthis, blurring certain categories but contributing to generating a problem that could well resurface and project its violence beyond Yemen.

UN figures indicate 3 million displaced people, of which some 500,000 are abroad, mainly in Arab capitals. The more the conflict becomes entrenched, the greater the risk that the number of refugees will rise, the latter progressively entering migratory networks that go from the Arabian Peninsula to Eastern Africa and then turn north to cross the Mediterranean. These flows towards Europe, which remain marginal for now, are not the only ones to generate political controversy in the more or less long term. The flows towards Gulf States in particular could lead to significant migratory pressure, especially since the border with Saudi Arabia remains permeable. Demographic data (an annual population growth of 3%) and the exhaustion of water resources in many Yemen regions will foster translational migration in any case. The war, however, accentuates and accelerates these dynamics, which will come at a cost for the region and the world. It also takes precious time away from attempting to find solutions to these structural challenges.

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