Kurds protest Turkish military deployment in Rojava

SERIMSAX, Syrian Kurdistan (K24) – Hundreds of people in the villages of Sermisax and Banokiya in the northeastern province of Hasakah gathered Monday along Syria's border with Turkey to protest a Turkish military deployment inside the Kurdish-held territory last week.

Demanding a withdrawal of the Turkish forces that were digging a trench of six kilometers long hundreds of meters inside the Syrian territory, one of the organizers of the protest, Ezeldin, a teacher from Serimsax, told a K24 correspondent that they were calling on the international community and Turkey insisting that the Turkish breach of border was unacceptable. "We will stay here until they go back," he added.

Men, women and children in the villages chanted slogans such as “long live the resistance of the North[ern Kurdistan]” in support of Kurds who are fighting Turkey's security forces for autonomy, as a committee made up of villagers went to the border line to negotiate with the Turkish military officers.

A member of the committee, Ebdilrehman Iso, told K24 that the Turks told them they were not redrawing the map but instead correcting the borderline "as found in old maps." Iso said, "They claimed to have been working within the knowledge of NATO. We said there are no maps, NATO did not tell you to cross the border, you want to create trouble, [and] our community will not allow you [to] take one palm of our land."

A colonial France and the young Republic of Turkey drew the part of the Syrian - Turkish border in the area in the early 1920s, in the aftermath of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.

A farmer, Rezan, 28, from the nearby Kurdish-Assyrian village of Til Cihan said that he could no longer go to his field on the borderline. He said, "When I wanted to go to where our water well is, they called on me not to come nearer, or we will shoot you." As he spoke, a Turkish excavator could be seen digging along concrete fences planted earlier.

Meanwhile, the Co-chair of the Executive Assembly of the self-declared Kurdish Canton of Jazeera, Ekrem Hiso, claimed Turkey wanted to "further ravage Syria by attempting to invade Rojava [Syrian Kurdistan]." Hiso, a member of the main Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) that rules the de-facto autonomous Syrian Kurdistan, spoke to K24 on Tuesday and said that Asayish [Kurdish internal security] and People's Protection Units (YPG) were "ready to defend" their land.

Last week the Kurdish National Council in Syria (ENKS), an alliance of Kurdish political parties competing with PYD, demanded a complete withdrawal of Turkish forces in the area.

(Dilovan Cheto and Heybar Othman contributed to this report from Qamishlo and Serimsax)