Due to international silence, occupied Afrin is being slaughtered, annihilated

“The shells that were falling on us like rain targeted the homes of my relatives in the village, so I ran to their rescue, remembering that the option of resisting with dignity in front of the fascists is costly, but inevitable and irreversible.” With these words, citizen Suleiman Arif described their situation as civilians during the treacherous attack of the Turkish occupation state on his Afrin city, March 18, 2018.

In this report, we review excerpts of the testimony of civilians who were directly targeted by the Turkish occupation army and its mercenaries, during the occupation attack on Afrin, in addition to mentioning the human rights perspective of those crimes that remained secret in international forums.

Resistance is a decision, not an option

During his conversation with our correspondent, the sixty-year-old citizen Suleiman Arif recalls the events he experienced during the brutal Turkish attacks, and says that they were directly targeted by the Turkish occupation and its mercenaries. He adds: “The occupation’s UAVs were targeting everything that moved, with the aim of intimidating us and emptying our areas, under "the brunt of intimidation is death."

Suleiman noted that the people resorted to cleaning caves and working on building cellars under their homes to take shelter from the bombing instead of fleeing, so that resistance would be a decision for them.

The systematic bombing of the Turkish occupation state, which directly targeted civilians at the time and placed health facilities within the scope of its attacks, caused the martyrdom of about 498 civilians, during 58 days of the Resistance of the Age in its first phase.

This is confirmed by lawyer Alaeddin Al-Khaled Kalo, who said that although Afrin is a shelter area for about half a million Syrians, this has not absolved it of the crimes of the Turkish occupation, which targeted residential communities to create terror and force civilians to leave their lands to change their population structure.

The Human Rights Organization Afrin - Syria confirmed in its latest report that the percentage of Kurdish citizens reached about 97%, compared to 3% for Arabs and Turkmen before the city was occupied by the Turkish occupation army.

However, this percentage changed during the Turkish occupation of the city, bringing the percentage of mercenaries and their settler families who were brought from several Syrian cities to more than 80%, and the percentage of Kurds in Afrin declined to 20%.

"Afrin under the microscope of international law"

International law addresses the issue of demographic change under the names of displacement, eviction, or forced transfer, and includes it among war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

Whereas forced displacement is defined as the forced and illegal eviction of a group of individuals and populations from the land on which they reside, and an action carried out by governments or groups that are intolerant of a particular ethnic or religious group; With the aim of evacuating certain lands to an alternative party or another group, which is exactly what happened in the occupied city of Afrin.

Lawyer Alaeddin said, "If all international laws were to apply their provisions to the current situation in Afrin, Turkish officials must be held accountable and brought to the International Criminal Court."

He added, explaining: “Among those laws are Articles 6, 7, and 8 of the Rome Statute of 1998, which explicitly consider forced displacement a war crime, and it is applied in all its aspects in Afrin.”

In this regard, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported in one of its reports the existence of what it called a “worrying trend” regarding grave violations in Afrin, Serêkaniyê and Tal Abyad (Girê Spi), where an increase in murders, kidnappings, involuntary transfer of people, seizure of land and property, and forced evictions was documented. We note that there is consistency with what was stipulated in Article Two of the United Nations Convention (the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide), which was approved on (12/9/1948).

Many jurists also point out the necessity of applying Article (49) of the four Geneva Conventions, dated August 12, 1949, and the two protocols attached to it for the year (1977) regarding war crimes, which are defined as those grave violations of the established rules when it comes to forced displacement.

Lawyer Alaeddin described the position of the international community as politicized, given its failure to take serious steps to confront demographic change, by denouncing either through reports or statements without taking actual measures on the ground, in the face of the declared comprehensive genocide.

It can be said that demographic change has included all aspects of life, and has become a serious threat to the future of the region, even affecting archaeological monuments from hills and sites, where their theft is another form of demographic change. Because it completely destroys the history of the region and falsifies it, like the site of Prophet Hori and Saint Maron.

The promise of return still stands

Citizen Suleiman Arif points out at the conclusion of his speech that among the special war policies that the occupation pursued against them was planting its cells to spread rumors among the people, but the matter did not pass them by, and the occupiers and traitors vowed to hold the people accountable to them, while the Resistance of the Age continues in its second phase.

In his turn, lawyer Alaeddin Al-Khaled Kalo concluded by blaming the Turkish occupation state for all the crimes committed in Afrin, the most recent of which was the assassination of the minor boy Ahmed Mamo (16 years old) at the hands of a settler, saying: “Everyone who hides the crimes committed in Afrin, and among them are those who It is called the Kurdish National Council. They are partners in these crimes and must be held accountable as traitors to the homeland and citizens.”

T/ Satt.

ANHA