Violations of “Peace Spring” lead IDPs away from the “Safe Zone”
Jano Shaker
By the evening, thousands of families were escaping to the town of Tal Tamer, moving away from the Turkish border where the heaviest battles take place in the city of Serê Kaniyê (Ras Al-Ain) and its countryside. Tal Tamer, midway between Serê Kaniyê and Hasaka, is only one of the displacement stations for the many residents of villages invaded by Turkish-led Islamic radical factions, alleged to be a so-called “safe zone”.
“These IDPs did not expect the battles to exceed 15 km, so they initially preferred displacement towards neighboring villages where relatives live,” said one displaced woman, Hasna Ahmad. After two previous displacements, anxiety stemming from an unknown fate was evident in her face. Like others who began a new chapter of displacement, Hasna Ahmad hopes the city of Hasaka will be her final destination.
Their reputation preceded them
Hasna, who is over sixty, tells us that groups of the Turkish National Army crept into the villages of Al-Manajir, Tal Jumah, Al-Safh and Al-Dawudiyah, which led to the spread of panic, followed by the movement of displacement in over 20 villages of the region.
“Panic is a justified thing,” for local civilians, says Hasna, because according to what she has witnessed, “the reputation of these groups precedes them.”
A few days before Hasna’s displacement, a faction called Ahrar al-Sharqiya executed nine civilians on the international road M4 once they gained control of the road near the village of Al-Tarwaziyyah. Among those executed was the Kurdish politician, Havrin Khalaf.
Other groups of the National Army robbed civilians of the village of Al-Dadat, 7 km east of Girê Sipî (Tal Abyad). Activists from the Syrian opposition confirmed that they were robbed of their mobile devices, insulted, and the homes of civilians in the villages of Tal Halaf and Al-Azizah were confiscated as beatings of civilian women occurred. Photos were published by opposition media, documenting the faction Al-Jabha Al-Shamiyyeh taking over the homes of Armenians and Christians in the Shallal and Armenian neighborhoods of Girê Sipî (Tal Abyad), once the factions took control of the towns.
The reputation of these groups and their terror practices pushed Hasna and her daughter into a second exodus from their village of Al-Manajir, after her first exodus from Serê Kaniyê where she had previously been living. Hasna and her daughter fled without knowing the whereabouts of Hasna’s husband and their other children who were out buying goods in the town of Tal Tamer at the time.
“I got out of Al-Manajir without carrying anything but the clothes we were wearing,” says Hasna. The sounds of bullets and shells that landed nearby forced them, like many others, to flee without looking back at the properties they left behind. “It was all we had collected over our entire lives,” she says with heartache.
Afrin is the obsession of the displaced Kurds
Unlike Hasna, Hussein’s family, from the village of Al-Dawudiyah, were able to overload their truck since family members knew that control over their village by invading factions would mean losing everything, according to the eldest son Sherwan. “We no longer know what the solution is, where we are heading to, and when stability will return to our regions. Perhaps, it is better to migrate out of this country,” Sherwan says grumblingly.
The scene of people loaded into cars and trucks followed by harvesters and tractors drawing agricultural tools and equipment on Hasaka road, suggests these families were already prepared to transport all the property they could carry.
Sherwan says, “the majority of these displaced people were surrounded by battles approaching their villages. Images of factions looting and pillaging as they seized control over the city of Afrin are still present in their minds. They fear they will be subjected to the same violations that civilians were exposed to there.” Several sources, including self-administration authorities, talk about the displacement of more than 300,000 civilians from their villages and towns since the start of the Turkish aggression on the northeast of Syria. But numbers are likely to increase, because attacks did not stop at the countryside of Serê Kaniyê (Ras Al-Ain), Girê Sipî (Tal Abyad) and Ain Issa, despite assurances from US President Trump that the ceasefire agreement remains intact. Last October, Amnesty International accused the Turkish forces and the coalition of armed groups backed by those forces of “committing war crimes, including attacks that resulted in killing and wounding civilians.”
Amnesty International said in its report that the information gathered provides compelling evidence about indiscriminate attacks on residential areas, including houses, bakeries and schools, as well as the cold-blooded assassination of Kurdish politician, Havrin Khalaf, by members of faction Ahrar Al-Sharqiyyah.
In the same area where Hafrin was killed, dozens of villages near international road M4 have witnessed a massive movement of displacement after radical Islamic factions infiltrated the villages of Lailan and Al-Arba’in, a few kilometers from Tel Tamer. As a result, thousands of civilians fled the battlefront and were displaced to the city of Hasaka, among them hundreds of residents who had previously fled to take refuge in schools in the town of Tal Tamer.
In Lailan, executions according to identity
At the western entrance to Tal Tamer, where we met Abdullah Hussein driving his car with his wife beside him, we were told they managed to get out of their house from the village of Lailan, after infiltration by factions of the National Army at dawn, as the factions began executing a number of young men on charges of working in civil or military self-administration authorities. They tell us that others were arrested according to lists of names that had been handed over by a collaborator from the region, called a “sleeping cell”.
According to the degree of suspicion or evidence dealing with self-administration authorities, they were killing everyone who might be considered to be from the Asayish forces or Syrian Democratic Forces, as well as from other civil sectors. And while these civilians were arrested, the factions looted and plundered a majority of civilian houses and properties.
In related context, Amnesty International has documented 20 recent cases of deportation of Syrian refugees by Turkish authorities, but it is expected that over the past few months, there have been hundreds of deportations of refugees. However, the organization also fears the results of the Turkish-Russian agreement and the Sochi Agreement on returning refugees to war zones without their consent.
Assyrian confusion and fear of the unknown
In the ancient part of the Assyrian town of Tal Tamer, 65-year-old Iman Kaku, who had previously been kidnapped with 280 other Assyrians by ISIS in February of 2015, does not hide her fear of pro-Turkish factions seizing control of her town.
Iman, who settled in Tal Tamer after ISIS released her two years ago in an exchange for ransom, was unable to return to her village Tal Jazirah again, as most of her neighbors had deserted the village to find safer areas inside and outside Syria. Iman, who has bid farewell to many of her relatives, talks about the confusion of the Assyrians in choosing between displacement of what is left of their land and the oncoming battles in villages and towns, and what her community might be exposed to if these factions take control. Her biggest concern is what these factions will do to them, that which ISIS didn’t do years ago.
Over the top of peoples’ belongings inside cars heading towards the city of Hasaka, children wave cameras, their innocent smiles revealing they have not yet been told about the suffering of displacement, while other children show looks of grave concern, greater than their young ages.