Throughout late December, a series of extensive Turkish airstrikes targeted the Kurdish-led autonomous regions of North and East Syria (NES). Targets included critical facilities such as a petrol station, construction material factories, food and agricultural production units, a printing house, grain silos, and a health centre. Eight civilians were killed.
This offensive follows a similarly devastating Turkish air campaign just three months ago, which crippled the energy infrastructure of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), leaving more than a million people without access to electricity and water. These punitive attacks were universally condemned by rights monitors, with the attacks seen as constituting the war crime of collective punishment against the civilian population in the region.
The Rojava Information Centre (RIC), a leading news and research centre based on the ground in NES, monitored the attacks and visited blast sites. Medya News spoke with Samantha Teal, a RIC researcher, to learn more:
Can you summarise the latest attacks?
It was just over two weeks ago that Turkey launched yet another multi-day aerial assault on North and East Syria, targeting civilian infrastructure and service facilities yet again. In these most recent airstrikes around the Christmas period, Turkey hit grain storage facilities, cement factories, car mechanics, olive oil factory, grains packaging factory, a clothing factory, a printing house industrial facilities, warehouses for storing construction materials, a wedding hall, two medical facilities plus an oil field, an electricity station, and a string of checkpoints of the Internal Security Forces.
What was the significance of these attacks’ timing?
Most severely targeted was Qamishlo, one of North and East Syria’s biggest cities, which has a significant Christian minority. Their holy period was also disrupted. This came not three months after a similar string of airstrikes in early October, really decimating the power and energy infrastructure.
How do these attacks affect the Administration’s ability to care for its population?
Over the last ten years, the Autonomous Administration really put effort into building up the production capacity of this small region so it can become more self-sufficient, and not rely on expensive imports from hostile neighbouring states and regions. Turkey is really targeting these efforts to build up productive capacity in the region… Turkey has made it clear it’s not going to tolerate a Kurdish-led project on its southern border, and Ankara’s Syria policy is driven by its domestic anti-Kurdish approach and opposition to political autonomy for Kurds in Turkey as well.
Is Turkey achieving its apparent objective of making life unbearable for civilians?
On the one hand yes, on the other hand no. As I mentioned, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks people were on the streets, protesting, calling for a No-Fly Zone; there was a clear spirit that ‘this is our home, you’re attacking our home, you’re attacking our livelihoods and we won’t let this happen, we will do what we can to protect the place we live in. And there were also groups of civilians going to an electricity plant, surrounding it to create a human shield, and saying ‘if you want to strike our infrastructure, you’ll have to kill us’.
But there were also people, of course, saying ‘in these conditions, how can we build a life here? How can we send our children to school here when schools are continually being disrupted by airstrikes?’ Or farmers, who cannot go to their fields near the border because there’s always Turkish shelling.
How are increasing tensions throughout the Middle East affecting the region?
Iran wants America out of Syria, and America supports the [Kurdish-led] Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF], so there are tit-for-tat attacks between America and Iran. Mazloum Abdi, the SDF commander-in-chief, gave an interview saying he didn’t want the region to become a place where these tit-for-tat attacks between big powers take place. The region’s leaders continue to call for peace, security and stability, but the wider geopolitical situation runs counter to these desires.
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