Afrin: A Case Study in Turkish de-Kurdification

Lessons From the Kelekçi Village Destruction Campaign

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kurds in the Kurdistan Region of Turkey (Bakur) faced intractable persecution at the hands of the state. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had taken up arms against Turkey’s government, and the counterinsurgency utilized every measure at its disposal to neutralize the guerrillas’ influence and capability. Entire villages within the country’s Kurdish regions were depopulated at gunpoint by the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) – some 3,000 in total. In one instance in 1992, the Kurdish village of Kelekçi in Diyarbakir (Amed) Province was razed by the Turkish gendarmerie while residents were herded together by the TAF. Turkish forces returned six months later to raze the village more completely. The Kurds who formerly resided there relocated to urban centers like Diyarbakir, Batman, and Urfa. Coercive Engineered Migration (CEM) is a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’s Article 7(1)(d), but the Turkish government utilized these tactics in their strategic campaign of Kurdish identity destruction. While the context of the PKK-Turkish conflict has changed dramatically between the 1980s and 2020s, Turkey’s successful past campaigns have provided a playbook that has proved workable for Turkish designs of de-Kurdification within the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), and particularly in the predominately Kurdish Afrin Region. Similar tactics to those previously employed directly by the TAF have been utilized by the Syrian National Army (SNA) and the more than 40 armed Turkish-backed proxy factions present in northern Syria (see Box 1).

Operation Olive Branch’s Human Rights Record

In 2018, Turkey coordinated with a collection of armed non-state factions to conduct an invasion of Afrin under the premise of fighting the PKK. By March 2018, the invasion was complete and an illegal occupation by Turkish and Turkish-proxy forces had begun. According to reports by the United Nations (UN) and other actors, Turkey and their proxies have violated international humanitarian law (IHL) repeatedly by committing the crimes of arbitrary detention, torture, persecution, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, forced displacement, and property theft against the Kurdish population of Afrin. Contrary to the official counter-PKK narrative framed around militancy, it’s much more reasonable to view Afrin in its geopolitical context. Prior to the invasion, Afrin announced its democratic incorporation into the predominately Kurdish AANES, and it welcomed the Kurdish-majority Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), who maintained security across the region. Turkey was motivated by power politics – not security concerns.

Partially driven by indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas that killed hundreds of noncombatants during combat, and partially driven by the widespread threat of torture and/or detention in its wake, an estimated 300,000+ Kurdish residents fled the region. According to the organization Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), Afrin – previously 95% ethnically Kurdish – has seen that percentage drop to 35%, a reduction of 74%. Meanwhile, the invasion’s official moniker has been criticized for its realization of the Orwellian slogan from 1984: “War is peace.”

The “Olive” in “Operation Olive Branch”

Olives, olive oil, and olive byproducts are the primary agricultural products in the Afrin Region. To fund their ongoing and illegal operation, occupation forces in de facto control of the region have resorted to looting and occupation of schools, shops, factories, and homes, and have levied crippling taxes on local Kurdish farmers’ olive groves and harvests, felling trees for lumber when fees and bribes are not forthcoming. According to Ahmed Hamaher and Afrin’s Local Council, the Afrin region contains 14,225,000 trees – down from a pre-invasion count of around 18 million. These trees bring $60m – $130m of revenue annually to the region. According to the Stockholm Center for Freedom’s 2021 reporting, “Turkish-backed militias [had] cut down nearly 1.5 million trees, including 650,000 olive trees.” Those figures have since increased. Across Afrin, separate militias control felling, transporting, and lumber smuggling operations to extract Kurdish profits for the benefit of the Turkish state and to offset the cost to Erdogan’s administration of maintaining proxy military forces across the Syrian border. These illegally obtained olive products, once they reach Turkey, are then sold internationally on the world market.

Beyond the financial aspect of militia extraction campaigns, olive trees and olive oil have a special significance throughout the Middle East. They are an international symbol of life and peace, and their destruction and theft represent the almost poetic depravity of Afrin’s occupation. An olive tree takes 7-10 years to reach full productive maturity, which means that these coercive and short-sighted policies provide immediate benefit to Turkey’s allies while ultimately degrading the economic foundations and value of farmland throughout the countryside. If farmers attempt to protest these actions, they face death threats, physical abuse, abduction, and torture. In many cases, then, the only recourse is to cut down their own trees before militias can claim them – or to leave. This is what a CEM looks like.

Coercive Engineered Migration

The institutionalized theft of industrial, agricultural, and personal property and the brutalization of the populace are not the only legacies of Kurdish persecution. Similar to their campaigns of terror in Bakur from 1985-2001, “ethnic cleansing” increasingly seems to be an accurate description of the occupation’s Afrin CEM policies. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey has accepted an impressive 3.6 million Syrian refugees. Contrary to the humanitarian motivations claimed by Recep Erdogan’s administration, however, this enormous population has represented a cudgel for Turkey’s ruling AKP to wield against European criticism. In 2019, Erdogan openly declared, “European Union…[I]f you try to present our operation as an invasion, we will open doors and send you 3.6 million migrants.” While Erdogan threatens his European allies, he acts against his Kurdish neighbors: using foreign funds and expertise, dozens of settlements have been constructed across the Afrin region for the express purpose of housing 1 million Arabs and Turkmen living in Turkey as well as Turkish-backed fighters who captured the region from the AANES.

Settlements have received funding in whole or in part by several Gulf Countries, including Qatar and Kuwait; from both Palestinian and Israeli donors – themselves both dealing with an illegal settlement crisis; and of course, Turkey itself. Since February’s earthquakes rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria, Arab refugees have faced increased pressures to return home. Turkey has deported approximately 50,000 migrants back to northern Syria – often through questionably coercive measures that include seizing property left behind without compensation. A large portion of these migrants have resettled in the Afrin Region. For those residents struggling to rebuild after the quakes, ethnically motivated violence has been meted out against Kurds by HTS and SNA factions, and aid has been consistently withheld from Kurdish populations.

Conclusion

Kurds in Turkey and Syria have faced Arabization campaigns meant to erase the Kurdish identity for decades. Afrin is unique in its position as an original canton of the AANES, and its collaboration with the Kurdish project in Rojava offered a potential future of autonomy, representation, and peace. Turkey’s Kurdophobia, instead, produced a humanitarian crisis that becomes more dire daily. 32 political parties and organizations from northeastern Syria recently held a press conference in Qamishli to denounce the Jinderes Massacre, where Turkish proxies killed four Kurds for celebrating Newroz on March 20, and demand the SNA be internationally declared a terrorist organization. Regardless of the identity of the perpetrators and their partners, we staunchly oppose any campaign aimed at erasing the cultural and political identity of the Kurdish people. The true “olive branch” must involve a complete withdrawal of all Turkish and Turkish-proxy forces from Afrin Region, and a new Turkish administration may find that it must deal with loud and legitimate claims for reparations to all those affected. For the hundreds of thousands in Afrin, this is the only way forward that offers any justice at all.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here represent those of the author and not necessarily those of the WKI.