Monday, 8 April, 2024 , 12:16
© 2024 Human Rights Watch
Abuses and Impunity in Turkish-Occupied Northern Syria
Disclaimer: this report contains distressing descriptions of violence and graphic details that may be disturbing to readers.
In swathes of northern Syria, Türkiye is an occupying power.
It exercises administrative and military control on the Syrian side of its southern border both directly and through a de facto proxy it helped create, the Syrian National Army (SNA), a loose coalition of armed opposition groups that is largely made up of former Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters.
The Turkish government has stated that it aims to turn the areas it occupies into “safe zones,” both to create a security buffer on its southern border and to accommodate returns of Syrian refugees living in Türkiye. But these areas are not safe; they are rife with human rights abuses primarily perpetrated by factions of the SNA and life for the region’s 1.4 million residents is characterized by lawlessness and insecurity. “Everything is by the power of the weapon,” said one former resident who lived under SNA rule for just under 3 years.
Based on interviews with 58 victims, survivors, relatives, and witnesses of violations, as well as various representatives of non-governmental organizations, journalists, activists, and researchers, this report documents abductions, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, including of children, sexual violence, and torture by the various factions of the SNA, the Military Police, a force established to curb such abuses, and members of the Turkish Armed Forces and Turkish intelligence agencies, including the National Intelligence Organization (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT) and a number of military intelligence directorates. It also documents violations of housing, land, and property rights, including widespread looting and pillaging as well as property seizures and extortion, and exposes the abject failure of most of the accountability measures introduced in recent years to curb abuses or to provide restitution to victims. As long as impunity for grave and systematic human rights abuses and possible war crimes reigns, hopes of return for the hundreds of thousands displaced and dispossessed Syrians who fled their homes during and after Türkiye’s successive military operations into the region continue to diminish. Many live in overstretched and underserved camps and collective shelters across northeast Syria today.
Since 2016, Türkiye has conducted three military operations into northern Syria aimed at weakening the Kurdish presence along its border. In its first operation in 2016, it occupied the predominantly Arab region north of Aleppo that included Azaz, al-Bab, and Jarablus, which had previously been under the control of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). In its second incursion in 2018, it captured Afrin, a Kurdish majority enclave just west of Azaz which had been under the control of Kurdish-led forces since 2012. And in its third incursion in 2019, Turkish Armed Forces wrested control of a roughly 150-kilometer-long and 30 km deep narrow strip of land between Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain (Kurdish name: Serekaniye) in northeast Syria from Kurdish-led forces. It carried out all three operations with the help of various local armed groups, including Turkmen groups, former Free Syrian Army groups, and other Islamist groups that in 2017 became collectively known as the Syrian National Army (SNA). The military incursions led to massive displacement and were fraught with serious abuses of both human rights and humanitarian law, including indiscriminate shelling, summary killings, unlawful arrests, torture and enforced disappearances, and systematic pillaging and unlawful seizure of property.
Today, several years later, Türkiye maintains control over the territories it occupies both through its armed forces and its intelligence agencies, with over 100 military sites, bases, and observation posts across northern Syria, as well as through its direct control over the SNA, which it supplies with weapons, salaries, training, and logistical support. Türkiye also exercises administrative control over occupied regions via local authorities in neighboring districts of Türkiye. The governor’s office of the Turkish province Hatay, for example, directly oversees the provision of education, health, financial services, and humanitarian aid in Afrin. In September 2023, Turkish media outlets reported that Türkiye had plans to designate a single governor to oversee all areas under its control, but as of January 2024 no developments of this kind had occurred.
While the SNA officially reports to the Ministry of Defense of the Syrian Interim Government (SIG), a self-declared, internationally recognized governing body representing the Syrian opposition and headquartered in Azaz, its factions ultimately answer to Turkish military forces and intelligence agencies. Military and civilian police forces established under the SIG’s supervision to enforce the rule of law following allegations of rampant abuses also answer to Turkish military forces and intelligence agencies, two informed sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of the SNA told Human Rights Watch. “Nothing takes place without their knowledge,” said one of them. Human Rights Watch was not able to find published directives outlining Turkish authorities’ role in the command structure in Turkish-occupied territories of Syria.
Because the Turkish authorities equate the People’s Protection Unit (Yekineyen Parastina Gel, YPG) and the Women’s Protection Unit (Yekineyen Parastina Jin, YPJ), the largest components of the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which they view as a terrorist organization and existential threat to Türkiye, Kurdish residents who lived in their homes and tended their lands under SDF rule, and who were thereby effectively considered loyal to the SDF or to any of its various components, have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the abuses documented. Arabs and others who were also perceived to have had ties with the SDF and the Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria (AANES), the civilian governing body in SDF-controlled areas, were also targeted.
This report makes clear that the Turkish authorities are not simply overlooking the miserable reality on the ground in northern Syria, but that they bear direct responsibility for many of the detention-related abuses and violations of property rights. These abuses and violations are most often directed at Kurdish civilians and anyone else perceived to have ties to Kurdish-led forces, and are very much in line with Türkiye’s stated goals of weakening the Kurdish presence in northern Syria and creating an “end-to-end” security belt or buffer zone between its southern border and areas controlled by the SDF in northern Syria. As tens of thousands of people fled to other parts of Syria, and beyond, during Türkiye’s incursion into Afrin, Turkish authorities were quick to orchestrate the resettlement of hundreds of Sunni Arab families displaced from Eastern Ghouta in homes of the district’s Kurdish inhabitants. Many more displaced families from Ghouta, rural Damascus, northern Hama, and Idlib, including those of the fighters deployed to the area, have arrived in Afrin in the years since. A similar trend has been documented in the strip between Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain following Türkiye’s 2019 military operation.
A second stated objective of Türkiye’s military incursions communicated by president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been to create so-called “safe zones” in the territories it occupies in order to resettle over a million Syrian refugees currently present in Türkiye, many of whom have lived there for years and who come from other areas of Syria. But as this report lays out, regions under Turkish occupation are far from safe. In addition to the absence of the rule of law, Turkish-occupied regions, like other parts of Syria, also suffer from dire economic and humanitarian conditions. Expelling large numbers of people to regions where they have a credible fear of persecution or torture would breach Türkiye’s obligations under international law. Expulsions and resettlement on a mass scale would also drastically change the ethnic composition of northern Syria, a region accustomed to experiencing forced demographic shifts.
Türkiye has already carried out forced returns of Syrian refugees. Since at least 2017, Turkish forces have arrested, detained, and summarily deported thousands of Syrian refugees, often coercing them into signing “voluntary” return forms and forcing them to cross into northern Syria through various border crossings. Indeed, in July 2023 alone, Türkiye sent back over 1,700 Syrians into the Tel Abyad area.
Accountability for human rights abuses and potential war crimes committed by commanders and members of various factions, as well as the Military Police in Turkish-occupied territories, remains elusive. Despite some limited internal prosecutions by the Syrian National Army, the military courts which have jurisdiction over such issues lack independence and impartiality, trials are rarely open to the public, and little information on proceedings is available. Türkiye has not taken meaningful steps to hold SNA elements or its own officials accountable nor grant access to independent human rights monitors.
In 2023, the United States sanctioned three SNA factions and their leaders for serious human rights abuses against civilians. In January 2024, two human rights organizations filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office calling on it to investigate violations of international law by SNA factions in Afrin since 2018. Under the principle of “universal jurisdiction”, national judicial officials can pursue cases against individuals credibly implicated in certain grave international crimes even though they were committed elsewhere and neither the alleged perpetrators nor the victims are nationals of the country.
As an occupying power and the de facto government in this area, Türkiye is obliged to ensure its forces strictly observe international human rights and humanitarian law, to restore and maintain public order and safety in territories it controls, protect inhabitants from violence, hold those responsible for abuses accountable, provide reparations for all victims of serious human rights abuses at the hands of its forces and local forces it controls, and guarantee the rights of property owners and returnees, including by compensating them for the unlawful confiscation and use of their property and any damage caused. Türkiye and the Syrian Interim Government should grant independent investigative bodies immediate and unhindered access to territories under their control.
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Related file: | ||||
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| N° | Document type | Document name | Size | Date |
| 1 | Download the full report in English | 3.96 MB | Tuesday, 9 April, 2024 , 17:21 | |
