Afrîn.. Twenty months of displacement between dreaming of return and clinging to the land 

Ahmed Katma

Those possibilities were not available when the demonstrations started in Syria in the spring of 2011, when the throats of the Syrians called for a new Syria, based on justice, equality and human rights.

But it seems that the popular saying that “Your grandfather’s enemy does not want you” has found itself justified in the Syrian case with Turkey, which has managed to transform the Syrians who once aspired a homeland that brings them into opponents who cannot sit at a round table to resolve their problems.

The Syrian case also managed to convert a bunch of armed men hiding behind the slogans of freedom, into hired killers, and also managed to take many Syrians as hostages to the idea that it has been spreading, which is based mainly on religious, sectarian and ethnic extremism, and that has transformed the areas which are under the control Turkish-led Islamic radical factions so called “National Army” to monochromatic taste and smell areas. It has no color other than “Muslim Brotherhood” color, and there is no taste other than the taste of extremism, and there is no smell other than the smell of threatening the rest of the Syrian components, especially the Kurds.

Turkey has been able to recruit Syrian extremists to fight the Kurds and their partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces, and has brought tens of thousands of families from the countryside of the cities of Homs, Damascus, Hama, Deir Ezzor, Idlib and Aleppo, in order to settle them in the Kurdish city of Afrin, under the pretext of that they are Syrians and they have the right to move to any Syrian city the want, which justifies an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement that occurred as a result of the Turkish offensive from January to March 2018.

Turkey has moved Syrian extremists and anti-Assad families from the rural areas mentioned above, to settle them in Afrin, it appears that the Turks have provided many temptations to these families in order to get out of their land, such as making promises to secure houses alongside hundreds of olive trees for each family that arrived there, while the Russian-Turkish coordination on this case is very clear, as the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar Al-Assad, visited the areas of Ghouta on the same day that Afrin fell on the eighteenth of March 2018.

Turkish temptations such as houses and properties, which the extremists justified as the spoils of Muslims from the “infidels”, because the Muslims here are invaders who brought their families to seize the properties of another component.

But it seems that these extremists only want rights for themselves, and do not want duties except for others, so they made it Halal for themselves and Haram for others, on the pretext that they are “atheists and apostates” and it is here in their view of the “Kurds”, who have received throughout the years of the Syrian war in their various regions hundreds of thousands of IDPs, granting them security and reassurance throughout the war years, until the armed groups affiliated with the Syrian opposition disbanded, seized Afrin, transformed its people into displaced people, and strangers on their land, while Ankara succeeded in dragging the (Muslim Brotherhood) groups into both its armed and civil sides, so that they could be tools that burns the land of the Kurds, to separate them, orphaning their children, and displace them from their homes under the name of Allah. However, a few of Afrin residents have decided not to displace nor to leave the land, nor to leave the olives, whatever the price, nearly a quarter of the population sticked to their villages, so that they would suffer the scourge due to kidnappings, torture, abuse and persecution, as if the years between 2011 and 2018.

Turkey and its followers from the Syrian radicla Islamic factions have tried in various ways to stifle the Kurds, by forcing them to pay taxes for everything, including transportation, housing, plowing of land, so taxes have been imposed on the transport of goods between Afrin and its countryside, and the imposition of transportation permissions for the population The Kurds are between Afrin and their villages, as if they are moving from a country to another.

Despite all of this, it seems that the residents of Afrin clinging to their land, and they are aware to the link of the return that must happen one day, no matter how long it takes, despite the big disappointment of the people who are in Afrin and the IDPs in Al-Shahba, Aleppo and East Euphrates.

After a year and a half of the occupation, the “Mount of Dreams”, which connects between Basuta and Kimar, is still a dream for all the people of Afrin, as they dream about returning to the city. Also, those who are inside the city dream about that day, to return to the embrace of their relatives, loved ones, neighbors and people of their villages.