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December 4, 2024

Turkey’s Erdogan funds an ethnic cleansing in Syria, complete with women seized as sex slaves

By Andrea Widburg

One of the things the media have been silent about since Turkish-backed forces attacked Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is how these same forces have used the moment to ethnically cleanse Kurds in northern Syria, including (as always with Muslim warriors) the sexual enslavement of women.

Most Westerners first became aware of the long-running regional war against the Kurds in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war. That was when news broke that after Iranian troops and allied Kurdish fighters captured an Iraqi military base near the Kurdish town of Halabja, Saddam Hussein ordered a poison gas attack on the town itself. The attack killed 3,000-5,000 civilians, injuring 10,000 more.

Since then, the Kurds have frequently found themselves on the receiving end of murderous attacks. So, who are the Kurds, and why does this happen?

The Kurds are an ancient people who live in a mountainous region that spans Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are remembered historically because Saladin, one of the medieval era’s most consequential Muslim leaders, was a Kurd.

Kurds comprise a minority in each of the nations in which they live, making them frequent targets of discrimination. The fact that they are mostly Sunni Muslims (although there are also Yazidis, Zoroastrians, and a few Christians) means that many clashes occur when they intersect with regional Shia Muslims.

However, the main reason Kurds are persecuted is because they want an autonomous Kurdish nation. To this end, they’ll often form alliances that operate on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That explains why the Sunni Kurds were fighting with the Shia Muslims in 1988 when both parties wanted to get the Sunni Iraqis out of the region. For the same reason, they allied with the US in 2017 and 2018, when both were trying to destroy ISIS.

By the way, this isn’t to say that the Kurds will pursue ethnic and religious liberty if they get their state. As this article notes, “In fighting their oppressors for autonomy and independence, the Kurds have in turn also sought to repress other ethnicities, notably the Armenians and Assyrians.” The notion of a free, pluralist society is not part of the Muslim makeup. Moreover, the Kurds are Marxists. In other words, between being Muslims, Marxists, and rebels, the Kurds are not good neighbors.

Because the Kurds are a burr in the saddle of the nations in which they’ve lived, and because those nations do not value human life, Kurds are frequently slaughtered en masse or forced into being refugees. In the same article linked above, you can read about the Turkish/Ottoman Empire genocide against the Kurds in the years before and during WWI (at the same time that the Turks committed the more infamous Armenian genocide), Iraq’s 1970 destruction of 600 villages and the forced relocation of 200,000 Kurds, and Saddam Hussein’s war against the Kurds mentioned above.

Another article lists Syria’s 1962 act stripping 120,000 Kurds of citizenship and Syria’s displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the 1970s under Bashar al-Assad’s father).

While Turkey was initially friendly to the Kurds, taking them in when they were rousted from other lands, that relationship turned frosty as Erdogan consolidated power. The relationship collapsed completely in Syria when the Kurds were allied with the U.S. against ISIS.

When Turkey inserted itself in the Syrian fight, it waged war against the Kurds, with the result that the two groups became deadly enemies. In 2018, Turkey invaded a Kurdish region in Syria and “ethnically cleansed more than 150,000 Kurds,” forcing them to move to new regions within Syria.

It’s that enmity and the Kurd’s relocation that brings us to today’s news. As you probably know already, Turkish-backed troops are waging (and currently winning) a war again Bashar al-Assad. (That’s led to the incredibly ironic report that al-Assad, a virulent enemy of Israel, has reached out to Israel for help.)

The Turkish-backed rebels are using their momentum to go after the Kurds in the regions to which the Kurds relocated after the 2018 ethnic cleansing. The troops are now attacking Kurds in that same region. Naturally, the invading troops are doing what Muslims always do—taking the women as sex slaves.

What’s so striking about all of this is the Western media’s silence:

(The tweet exaggerates because the cleansing has occurred over six years, not four days, but the two main points are still accurate: ethnic cleansing and the world’s silence.)

The same world—which says “meh” when Hamas rapes and slaughters Israelis, weeps for every genocidal militant killed in battle in Gaza, and works itself into a frenzy that, despite Israel’s best efforts, it occasionally kills the children that Hamas uses as shields and targets—is giving a giant collective shrug about the Kurds.

Everyone knows why the world is silent, too:

The world’s bodies, whether national governments, NATO, or the UN, are so deeply corrupt, and Biden has been dragging America in the same direction. This corruption is led by support for and fear of Islam, hatred for America and Israel, and generalized Marxism. I am so grateful that Donald Trump has a chance to change this dynamic. He cannot be inaugurated soon enough.

Image: X screen grab (cropped).

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