The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists condemn Turkeys invasion of Northeastern Syria and its deadly assault on the Kurds.
Last week, after U.S. president Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from Northeastern Syria on October 9th, Turkey began the bombing of its Syrian border regions and cities. The authoritarian and reactionary Ankara government launched another military operation in northeastern Syria.
Northeastern Syria has been controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a military alliance of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian fighters, dominated by the Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the military branch of the Kurdish Movement of the Democratic Union Party (known by the Kurdish acronym PYD). Ankara has labelled it a “terrorist” organization because of its links with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of Turkey.
More than 100,000 civilians have already fled the areas bombed and threatened by the Turkish invasion. 200,000 more are threatened with displacement.
The Turkish army’s offensive is conducted in cooperation with Syrian fighters of the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of reactionary and Islamic fundamentalist groups financed and led by the Turkish government. The SNA has already committed numerous violations of human rights, particularly in the Afrin region, currently occupied by the Turkish army.
This military operation is Turkey’s third invasion of Syria since 2016: The first, in August 2016 was titled “Shield of the Euphrates”; the second, in January 2018 was called “Olive Branch”. It led to the occupation of the Afrin region in March of the same year, and resulted in the forced displacement of more than 150,000 people, most of them Kurds, with many human rights violations still ongoing.
This Turkish military aggression is a continuation of the Ankara government’s war against Kurdish liberation movements and their representatives in Turkey, including the Democratic People’s Party (known as the HDP), and in neighboring countries, especially Syria and Iraq.
Another objective of the Turkish government in Syria is to forcibly transfer Syrian refugees from Turkey to the areas east of the Euphrates. Since the summer of 2019, Turkey’s government has accelerated campaigns of forced expulsions of Syrian refugees towards Syria. Thousands of Syrian refugees in Turkey have been subjected to mass deportations or forcibly