Stop Turkey’s Genocide in Afrin

Turkey, with the second army of NATO, equipped with highly developed military weapons, launched its attack on the canton of Afrin, in Northern Syria on January 20th 2018. The Turkish army, under the command of the neo-Ottoman regime led by fascist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and using Jihadist groups and Islamist militias including ISIS, and al-Qaida veterans as well as members of Turkish far-right groups as ground troops, has come to ruin Syria’s Kurdistan. These troops, supported by the Turkish army’s tanks and F16 fighters, do just as ISIS did. They brutally kill people, destroy buildings and historical monuments and loot properties wherever they go.

The city of Afrin and its villages, with more than 300,000 inhabitants, have been ruined and occupied. The bodies of hundreds of women and children are abandoned in blood and have fallen like leaves on the streets in the middle of fire and bombs under the parades of military vehicles and tanks. During Turkey’s attack which is code-named as ‘Operation Olive Branch’, thousands of YPG (People’s Protection Units) and YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) militia and civilians have been killed so far, many villages have been destroyed and local inhabitants have been displaced or forced to evacuate their villages. This genocide could have not taken place without a green light from US imperialism and the complicity of Russian imperialism and the Islamic regimes of Iran and Iraq. This is a terrible crime against humanity. But what is the aim of this aggression by a NATO member and the agreement of global imperialism?

The canton of Afrin shares border with Turkey and is protected by the YPG and YPJ militia who defended Kobane against the Islamic State and fought this terrorist group in Raqqa. Amid Syria’s war, the Democratic Federation Northern Syria, known as Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria consisting of three self-governing cantons of Afrin, Jazira, and Kobane, was officially declared. Tens of parties and hundreds of delegates gathered in a constituent assembly representing these three self-administrated cantons. In Rojava, Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens and several other ethnic and religious minorities are coexisting in peace and sanity. Grassroots democracy, women’s liberation and a full representation of all mentioned groups organized in a council system make the constitutive principles of Rojava.

The purpose of Turkey’s attack is not actually what Erdoğan announced when he said: “YPG is an extension of PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), is a terrorist force and is a security threat on our borders, thus must be defeated and kept away from our borders”, rather the purpose is to hide the failure of his internal and regional policies behind these attacks.

In the June 2015 elections, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the majority it needed to form a government on its own, due to the 13 percent unprecedented vote share that went to the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a party with its roots in Kurdish politics and an effective challenger of the AKP. Because of this, Erdoğan failed to achieve his goal of creating a government on his own and had to call a snap election on 24 August 2015. Erdogan is also facing both political and economic problems in the society. Mass protests by Kurdish people, workers, women and other progressive and radical layers of the Turkish society have been a daily matter. Turkish government has been arresting thousands of journalists, activists, Kurdish representatives in Turkish Parliament, all on claims of “terrorists” and “terrorist” sympathies.

Erdoğan’s policy in the region has also failed. Since the beginning of the war in Syria, Turkey has been covertly and overtly helping and supporting terrorist and Islamic jihadist groups in the hope of extending its influence in the region and revive the Ottoman Empire, but all of these have so far failed. Not just that, but the Kurds, its main enemy and a blocker to Erdoğan’s plans, are taking control near Turkey’s borders. Erdoğan is afraid that same democratic experience in Rojava could flow into Turkey’s Kurdish areas and hence the brutal attack on Afrin.

Two months of historical resistance by women and men, elderly and young people, who, just like the communards of the Paris Commune in 1871, defended their homes and their self-governance to the last breath, with empty hands and without any help from outside, against aggressors who were striking Afrin from air and ground under the flag of nationalism, religion, racism, and new Ottoman rulers. Left alone and in the siege of the regional governments, Afrin fell to the control of Turkish army and its backed barbaric forces in front of the eyes of the world and as a result of the silence and complicity of Russia, the United States, and the European Union, but the will and aspirations of its people for emancipation remained invincible. After two months of air and ground strikes, 72 bombardments in just one day, the Turkish Army forces occupied Afrin, following the retreat of the defending units of YPG and YPJ. The bombing of the city's only hospital that killed dozens of nurses, wounded people and patients, was the message of the criminals who did not hesitate to kill hundreds of thousands of people in the pursuit of their criminal targets. The decision by the defending units to retreat was taken to prevent more of this kind of bombardments and to save people’s lives. The Turkish army, under NATO's auspices, with hundreds of tanks and thousands of fascist-jihadi forces while striking from the ground and air, reached the center of Afrin and occupied this canton on Sunday morning March 18, after two days of uninterrupted bombardment.

One day after occupying Afrin, Erdoğan, Turkish criminal president, said: "After Afrin, we will go to Manbij, Kobane and Qamshli to force out the Syrian Kurdish forces.", which means that they want to throw out the owners of these lands from their homes. This is ISIS which has come back. The defeated ISIS has been put back together and rebuilt under the command of the Turkish bourgeois regime. The Russian and American imperialists who have agreed on how to divide Syria between themselves, are accomplices of Turkey in this genocide, occupation and aggression. Turkish Foreign Minister Mouloud Chavosh Oglu told Reuters on Wednesday, March 21st, that the country has reached an agreement with the United States over the city of Manbij, one of the important areas under the control of the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party.

Afrin, Qamshli, and whole Rojava need urgent help. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced and the fascists have looted the city. Aggressors have been looting homes, shops, restaurants, farms and vehicles and so on. The jihadists and the Turkish army consider looting a reward for their “holy war” or Jihad. The mercenaries with chariots and cars parade on the corpses of the people.

Now in this situation, we have a historical and human responsibility to condemn this crime and genocide. It is the duty of every free and progressive human being to support these peoples, put pressure on their governments, and defend humanity and human values against the fascist and reactionary forces under the command of Neo-Ottomanize. In this situation, it is the historical and class duty of the labor and socialist movements, and all internationalist and freedom loving people to defend the people of Afrin, and other cantons in Kurdish area who are now being crushed under the boots of one of the largest armies of NATO and global capital.



International Relations Bureau of the Communist Party of Iran
26 March 2018

Email: international@cpiran.org