The war on Syrian Kurds and the little-known axis of ethnic cleansing - opinion

Turkey and Qatar routinely accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza – while they perpetrate real ethnic cleansing in Syrian Kurdistan. 

A month-long investigation by Jusoor, a new Arabic media outlet that I lead, documents a massive campaign steered by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, funded by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and operated by Kuwaiti and Palestinian Islamists to evict Kurdish residents from their ancestral homes in northwest Syria and replace them with Syrian Arab settlers. 

Local and global rights groups have raised alarms about these crimes, but the perpetrators continue their campaign, unrestrained by the international community. 

“We escaped under fire – women and children,” recalled Naima Khalil, a refugee from the historically Kurdish town of Ifrin in Syria’s northwest. “For 15 days, we slept outdoors, under Turkish shelling. By night, we fled from town to town.” An area rights group reports that Turkey’s assault on Ifrin has reduced the Kurdish population of the city by 60 percent.

The ongoing military assault, targeting Ifrin and other northwest Syrian towns, is accompanied by a settlement-building project, announced by Erdogan in 2023, to move one million Syrian Arab refugees into Kurdish areas. As part of the initiative, Qatar’s ruler agreed to finance the construction of 240,000 homes across nine Syrian provinces. In June, Qatar’s Red Crescent Society tweeted that 13 such villages had been completed, sufficient to house 22,000 Syrian Arabs. 

Kurdish activists denounce the project as “ethnic cleansing.”

At least one of the settlement blocs in Ifrin was built by a Palestinian NGO: the Gaza-based, Hamas-affiliated Ajnadeen “charity” group. Last year, the organization acknowledged financing the construction of 200 residential units. Abdulrahman Apo, a Kurdish politician from Ifrin, charges that 10,000 Palestinians among the settlers.

Alongside Turkish, Qatari, and Palestinian participation, Syrian investigative journalist Sardar Malla Darwish has uncovered Kuwaiti funding and operational assistance. Our own reporter in Ifrin found Kuwaiti flags and the logos of Kuwaiti Islamist NGOs identifying themselves as benefactors.  

Campaigns against Kurdish culture, language 

This reprehensible operation also features a campaign against the Kurdish language and culture.

“They banned the Kurdish language and imposed Turkish in schools,” observed Nawaf Khalil, head of Ifrin’s Kurdish Studies Institute. Turkish-backed militias also massacred a family engaged in Nowruz celebrations, an ancient Kurdish tradition, marking “the last time Kurds could celebrate Nowruz in what was once a Kurdish-majority city,” Khalil said.

Amid the tragedy, Kurdish observers view Erdogan’s incessant portrayal of the war in Gaza as Israeli “ethnic cleansing” as a smoke screen for his egregious behavior.  

“The Kurds are trying in different ways to tell the world that Erdogan is a liar and hypocrite and he’s trying to hide his crimes against the Kurds by exaggerating and lying about what’s happening in Gaza,” Darwish, the investigative journalist, said. “Erdogan thinks that if all the talk and criticism is focused on Israel’s military operation in Gaza, he can continue to oppress the Kurds as much as he wants.”

While the world turns a blind eye, despair only grows for Kurdish refugees such as Naima Khalil and her family: “We don’t know what our fate will be or where we should go.”

The writer is editor-in-chief of Jusoor, a pan-Arab news outlet supported by the Center for Peace Communications.