Turkey’s assault on its Kurdish enemies could have far-reaching implications not just for the Middle East but for Europe too, writes Catherine Philp
President Erdogan’s stated battlefield in northern Syria is 300 miles long, 20 miles wide, and serves two purposes for Ankara.
Invading this stretch, in Mr Erdogan’s telling, allows him to neutralise what he regards as the cross-border threat from the Kurds while also solving what he has called Turkey’s “refugee problem”. The Syrian Kurdish goal of lasting autonomy will be crushed, and most of the 3.6 million Syrian Arab refugees who fled war for sanctuary in Turkey will be deposited there.
“Turkey estimates that up to two million Syrian refugees will volunteer to live in a 20-mile secure area spanning from the Euphrates River to the Syria-Iraq border,” wrote Fahrettin Altun, Mr Erdogan’s chief media adviser, in The Washington Post this week.
If the safe zone went farther south, it would fit the other 1.6 million refugees, he said.
The idea that 6,000 square miles of northern Syria could be denuded of their local Kurdish populations, with two million refugees bussed in, has drawn widespread horror and condemnation from around the globe. The International Rescue Committee said the northern area of Syria under Kurdish control is home to about two million civilians who have “already survived Islamic State brutality and multiple displacements”.
Syrian Kurds are warning of ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering of areas along the border. There are an estimated 1.8 million Kurds in Syria, about half of whom live within the proposed buffer zone. Areas under Kurdish control are believed to have about 1.5 million Arabs and tens of thousands of Christians.
Turkey might attempt to start on a smaller scale, extending only a few miles into Syria around several pockets. The first targets were Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad, two historically Sunni Arab border towns.
This is not the first Turkish incursion in Syria’s eight-year war. In 2016 Ankara launched Operation Euphrates Shield, pushing into the Arab area around Jarablus at the western end of the envisaged buffer zone. Turkish forces ousted Kurdish militias from the border and a zone of Turkish control was created and some Syrian refugees resettled.
Syria’s Kurdish population is concentrated in the east with the enclaves of Afrin and Kobani farther west. Afrin was the site of Turkey’s last big operation into Syria, which displaced half the enclave’s 320,000 population. Turkish soldiers and their Syrian Arab allies are still fighting a Kurdish insurgency there.
Qamishli, the largest city within the proposed buffer zone, is an ethnically mixed Christian centre, inhabited predominantly by Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians and Kurds. The countryside across the border area is scattered with villages. The open plains would make it difficult for the lightly armed Kurdish force to resist Nato’s second-largest army.
Flooding the proposed buffer zone with Syrian Arabs whose original homes are scattered all across Syria would represent a massive demographic change as well as a serious breach of international law, which forbids the forcible return of refugees to their homelands against their will and where they might remain in danger.
Turkey promised not to do so when it signed a deal with the European Union in 2016 intended as a solution to the migration crisis into Europe. In return for agreeing to take back refugees trying to reach Europe through Greece, Ankara received €6 billion and visa-free travel for its cities.
That the deal was a sticking plaster, doing nothing to solve the refugee crisis.
Mr Erdogan’s threats yesterday to unleash 3.6 million Syrian refugees on Europe show how far he is willing to go to weaponise the homeless survivors of Syria’s grinding conflict.
Turkey began returning small numbers of refugees to Syria earlier this year, taking them to Idlib, the province where it maintains a military presence in an arrangement supposed to prevent a new refugee flow.
Idlib has become the dumping ground for surrendering Sunni rebel fighters, transported there from around the country as Damascus tries to remake the Syrian state in a demographic form more friendly to the Alawite Assad regime, not unlike Turkey’s current effort along its southern border.
The project helped the Assad regime to retake swathe after swathe of the country, with Russian and Iranian support, and eliminate resistance from key areas.
But the war also changes the demographics and the political realities all along Syria’s border with Turkey, giving the Kurdish fighting force, the YPG, the opportunity first to establish autonomy in their own cantons and then expand their control even over traditionally Arab areas.
Turkey’s proposal seeks not only to reverse that control but entirely rewrite the area’s pre-war demographics.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/recipe-for-disaster-how-erdogans-invasion-of-syria-will-create-a-new-refugee-crisis-qnd6pc99r
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