Turkey resettles Iraqi Turkmens to Alevi-Kurdish village
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – Turkish authorities on Wednesday resettled 5,300 Iraqi Turkmen refugees to a camp in an Alevi Kurdish village in the Kahramanmaras Province, southern Turkey.
The container camp built by the Turkish Prime Ministry’s Disaster and Emergency Directorate in the Sivricehoyuk village now hosts 750 Turkmen families, said the private-owned Dogan news agency.
Almost all of them were from the Islamic State-held town of Tal Afar and city of Mosul in Nineveh Province of Iraq, added the agency.
Refugees were initially settled to a resort complex in the Kurdish town of Islahiye some 70 kilometers (43 miles) south in the Gaziantep Province in late 2014 after they fled to Turkey from an IS blitzkrieg against the Iraqi Army.
As Turkish authorities built the camp Sivricehoyuk in March 2016, hundreds of people from the area staged several protests over the following months.
Protestors argued the resettlement of refugees from Syria and Iraq was aimed at changing demographics of the region.
Lawmakers from opposition parties including Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) joined the demonstrations in April and May where some people clashed with police.
Kahramanmaras was the scene of a week-long massacre of Alevi Kurds where nearly 500 men, women, and children were murdered by mobs of Turkish neofascist group “Grey Wolves” and their supporters in December 1978.
There was an exodus of Alevis from the province toward elsewhere in Turkey and European countries in the aftermath of the sectarian and ethnic pogrom.
In June 2016, Turkey’s government brought 72 Meskhetian Turkish families from the civil war-torn Eastern Ukraine to the Kurdish province of Bitlis where the Prime Ministry’s Social Housing program built apartments for them on the shores of Lake Van.
The government’s decision led to allegations in the Kurdish media of a repeat of the 1930s’ Turkification plans in Kurdish-majority areas by the administration of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany
