The United Nations (UN) and NATO must take a clear stance against Turkey’s “crimes against humanity” and “policies of Kurdish genocide”, Kurdistan Democratic Communities Union (KCK) stated on Friday after Turkish drones unleashed 20 strikes in northeast Syria (known as Rojava) on Thursday, killing eight.
Turkey’s aerial bombardment hit critical civil infrastructure, heightening concerns of an impending humanitarian crisis, an independent local rights watchdog reported.
“Civilians as well as the civil infrastructure have been targeted. It is reported that many were killed and wounded in the attacks and that dams, facilities, shops and workplaces were bombed by warplanes,” said the KCK, an organisation that supports Kurdish self-administration.
The KCK described the attacks as “inhumane”, and said that a long-standing “Kurdish enmity” had led to a “genocidal mentality” inside Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) – Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) alliance government, at the hands of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Explaining the attacks on Rojava with the action in Ankara is a complete distortion and excuse,” the KCK continued, referring to Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s legitimising of cross-border attacks on Kurdish-led territories, following a bomb attack by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) outside the Ankara’s Interior Ministry on 1 October.
The KCK reiterated that a decision had already been made, long before the Ankara incident, to “invade Rojava and displace the Kurds through massacres and displacement”.
“No official international institution and state, especially the UN, has criticised or taken a serious stance against these attacks by the Turkish state,” the organisation pressed. “We once again call on international institutions and states, especially the UN, to take a clear stance against it.”