Washington Kurdish Institute
April 20, 2020
The authoritarian regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made a habit of using the plight of refugees as a tool to provoke and extort Europe and the broader international community. At present, millions of Syrians who have fled a bloody, protracted civil war in their homeland reside in Turkey, a country that has provided shelter and strong support to various jihadist groups active in this ongoing conflict. Erdogan often threatens to allow these refugees to leave for Europe to coerce European nations into turning a blind eye to his regime’s systematic military aggression and violations of human rights and gain economic aid and concessions from Europe and the international community. While Erdogan’s use of Syrian refugees has captured the attention of the world, very little has been said of Turkey’s longstanding aggression against a community of Kurdish refugees that fled persecution by the Turkish military and has nonetheless been targeted by the Turkish Armed Forces for decades, the 13,000 residents of the United Nations Makhmour Refugee Camp in northern Iraq. Since 2017, Turkey has attacked the Makhmour Camp numerous times, eliciting barely a world of condemnation from regional authorities or the international community. Below is a timeline of recent Turkish military aggression against the people of the Makhmour Camp:
- December 6, 2017 – Turkish launched missiles at the Makhmour Camp, targeting members of the camp’s self-defense units which were formed as a response to attacks on the camp by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization. This attack killed 5 members of the self-defense units and wounded three others
- December 13, 2018 – Turkish warplanes struck the Makhmour Camp, killing four women, Asya Ali Mohammed (age 73), her daughter Narinç Ferhan Qasim (26), and her granddaughter Evin Kawa Mahmoud (14) as well as Eylem Mohammed Amir (23)
- July 19, 2019 – Turkish warplanes dropped at least 3 bombs in the vicinity of the Makhmour Camp, injuring two civilians and damaging the vineyards and orchards of camp residents
- April 15, 2020 – Turkish military drones struck the Makhmour Camp, killing three young women, Havva Akdogan (age 22), Azime Aydogan (23), and Ayshe Ahmed Ferhan (17). According to the camp council, the three women had been tending to their farm animals
The Makhmour Refugee Camp, located in the city of Makhmour, south of the city of Erbil near the provincial border with Nineveh (Mosul), is currently home to approximately 13,000 Kurds. These refugees initially fled to Iraq from Kurdish majority areas in Turkey in 1993 and 1994 as a result of Turkey’s scorched earth campaign against the Kurdish people within the country’s borders, which destroyed thousands of villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. In 1998, years after fleeing their homes, they arrived in Makhmour and built new lives on an isolated, dusty patch of land that became a large refugee camp recognized by the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Since 1998, thousands of children have been born into statelessness at the camp. Over the years, the people of the Makhmour Camp have survived various dire threats to their existence, including attacks by the Turkish military and ISIS, and various types of pressure by local authorities.
Erdogan and the Turkish military have attacked and threatened the people of the Makhmour Camp for many years, and habitually label the civilian residents of the camp as “terrorists” to justify this ongoing aggression. Indeed, Erdogan and the Turkish authorities insist that this camp, which is filled with families, is a camp of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a military site. This technique is not new for the Turkish government or military, who have for decades used the pretense of fighting “terrorism” to target Kurds and those who advocate for the rights of the Kurdish people worldwide – within Turkey, in Syria and Iraq, and beyond. This was the same justification used by Erdogan when he initiated a campaign of military aggression and ethnic cleansing last year against Kurdish regions in Syria alongside the border with Turkey, displacing an estimated 300,000 civilians, and the same argument used time and time again to explain Turkish military attacks elsewhere throughout Iraq.
The United Nations and the international community must condemn the Turkish military’s attacks on the vulnerable people of the Makhmour Camp and act to prevent further aggression against these refugees by Erdogan and the Turkish state. Additionally, the government of Iraq must condemn these crimes committed against civilians living within Iraq’s borders who have been repeatedly targeted by military airstrikes using Iraqi airspace, and the local Kurdish authorities should work with the United Nations and Iraqi government to allow much needed humanitarian aid into the Makhmour Camp and ensure the safety of the camp’s residents. Local and international aid groups should work to provide the camp with desperately needed assistance, and monitor and pressure all relevant governmental institutions to coordinate and facilitate these efforts. The people of the Makhmour Refugee Camp, now coping with new threats and challenges over two decades after being forced from their homes by Turkish military aggression, must not be forgotten or forsaken.