North Syria: Turkish guards shoot Kurdish man
KOBANE, Syrian Kurdistan (K24) – On Friday, Turkish border guards shot dead a Kurdish man from Kobane who attempted to cross the border to Turkey illegally, a K24 reporter in Kobane reported.
The K24 reporter in Kobane said the Turkish border guards shot F. Osman, a Syrian Kurd from Kobani, while he was trying to cross the border from the village of Kor Ali on the Turkish border in northern Syria.
Asked about what led Osman to leave his hometown, his friend told a K24 reporter that Osman had thoughts of reaching Europe illegally, taking the risk of paying people-smugglers to board one of the so-called ghost ships from the Turkish port of Izmir.
“There is nothing for him and his family in Kobani now. Terrorists devastated the town, and destroyed all his farming equipment. So he tried to reach Europe and then call for his family to join him,” Osman’s friend said.
On the other hand, sources from the Turkish border guards of Ceylanpınar, a district of Sanliurfa province in southeastern Turkey, told K24 that Turkish authorities keep denying such incidents on the border, and sometimes they consider such procedures part of the precautionary measures for the security of the border.
“People of the Kurdish areas in Syria resort to crossing to Turkey illegally because the southern Turkish borders with Syrian Kurdistan are closed,” a member staff of Foreign Relations Office in Ras Al-Ain told K24, noting that the border crossings of Qamishli and Ras Al-Ain (Sere Kani) have been closed since 2012 when fighting between the Kurdish forces and jihadis broke out.
It is worth mentioning that shooting Syrians who attempt to cross into the Turkish lands illegally is frequent.
On August 14, 2015, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that three Syrians had been killed by guards while trying to enter the country.
Furthermore, On November 20, 2014, Amnesty stated that at least 17 people were shot and killed by border guards at unofficial crossing points between December 2013 and August. The report cited ten other incidents in which Turkish border guards had allegedly beaten 31 people.
Turkey, which has registered more than two million Syrian refugees since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, continues to see largenumbers of Syrians seeking refuge in the country. Ankara has repeatedly called on the international community to help it deal with the refugee crisis.