Senior Kurdish politician fears Turkey will Arabize Afrin
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A prominent Syrian opposition Kurdish figure, Nuri Birimo, said on Monday that Afrin was facing an Arabization policy threat by Turkey which captured the town in Syrian Kurdistan from the US-armed forces.
“Unfortunately, the bride of Kurdistan, Afrin, is today gripped by the wolf’s jaws,” Birimo told Kurdistan 24 in an interview, using a Kurdish idiom that meant imminent danger of getting slaughtered.
Birimo, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria (KDP-S), a faction opposed to Syrian Kurdistan’s ruling Democratic Union Party (PYD), said, “a million Kurds” were facing the threat of “death, forcible displacement, Arabization, and Turkification” after Ankara’s takeover of Afrin.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly claimed that the Kurdish region “belonged to Arabs” and he intended to “give it back to its rightful owners.”
The Turkish attack has killed over 250 civilians, 1,500 YPG fighters, and displaced hundreds of thousands, leading to an exodus.
He called Turkey’s Free Syrian Army (FSA) proxies that have been instrumental in the now two-month-long invasion “mercenaries and Tora Bora-ist,” in reference to the Ankara-backed militants’ apparent sympathies if not direct links with al-Qaeda.
“They are holding swords and going about in Afrin to intimidate people. Their conduct is inhumane and savage with Ankara’s approval,” Birimo, himself a native of the town, stated.
“They are pillaging Afrin. In their view, the Kurdish people of Afrin are disbelievers, they have even named their campaign as a conquest in religious terms. That’s why so many people have fled,” Birimo said.
“We have to tell Turkey to act like a state, instead of sending in mercenaries. You have now invaded Afrin that is in another country. At least try to abide by international law,” he said.
He also warned against the possibility of Turkey’s turning Afrin into “another Northern Cyprus,” where the Turkish army remains as an occupying force since its invasion of the island in 1974.
When asked by Kurdistan 24 why his party was not using its ties through the Syrian opposition with Turkey to prevent further attacks on the Kurdish people and symbols, he denied any relations but said they were ready for talks to demilitarize the area.
“The Kurdish question, whether in Afrin, Erbil, or Qandil can be solved only through dialogue,” he said, in remarks urging Turkey to politically engage with Kurdish demands and not through a narrow security and military prism.
While blaming Russia for giving the green light to Turkey in the first place, he also criticized the PYD, his Kurdish political rivals whose armed forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), defended the self-declared canton until their withdrawal on Sunday.
On Turkey’s designation of the PYD and YPG as “terrorists,” a claim that constituted for the assault, Birimo said it was but “an excuse” for Ankara in its pursuance of an anti-Kurdish policy that targeted Afrin.
“But, now we are in a different stage. I have my own relatives in Afrin. We, the people of Afrin, need to go back to our villages, if necessary by holding white flags. We cannot simply abandon our ancestors’ lands,” he said, despite risks of persecution by the Turkish army and its proxy forces.
“There is a plan of Arabization, and it appears an understanding on that was reached between Russia, Iran, and Turkey months ago in the Sochi summit,” he said, reminding of a November 2017 meeting between leaders of those countries.
“They have agreed to give the West of Euphrates to Turkey. And the East of the river is for Iran to deal with,” suggesting an Iranian-Turkish collaboration in trying to oust the US from the rest of Syrian Kurdistan where it has military bases and forces supporting the YPG in the fight against the Islamic State.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany
(Kurdistan 24's Buhar Derwish interviewed Nuri Birimo)