This week in Northern Syria (XVI)
This week in Northern Syria (XVI)
A rundown of key events from Turkish/SNA & SDF-controlled territories
Note: this newsletter has excluded events relating to to the Abu Ghannoum assassination, subsequent SNA infighting, and HTS’s invasion of Afrin occurring within this time frame (October 18-24), which will be addressed in a subsequent post.
Events
10/18/22: Iraq repatriated 634 individuals belonging to 157 families from al-Hawl camp. NPA reported that prior to this 790 families had been repatriated. According to RIC 27,000 Iraqi citizens, primarily women and children, remain in al-Hawl.
10/18/22: French cement firm Lafarge pleaded guilty in US courts to supporting the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, agreeing to pay a $778 million dollar penalty to the US government. The case revolved around a $680 million dollar plant built outside the eastern Aleppo village of al-Jalabiyah/Khirab Hisaq in 2010 and kept operational until late 2014 through bribes to armed factions including IS and Nusra. I highly recommend checking out Aron Lund’s 2018 deep dive into the factory and its wartime history.
10/18/22: Syrian Civil Defense reported that six ‘workers’ were injured in a missile attack carried out by SDF or regime forces, targeting a car at the al-Hamran crossing in eastern Aleppo. Al-Hamran connects the Turkish/SNA-controlled Euphrates Shield region to SDF/regime-controlled Manbij and represents a key financial asset due to it being the main artery of the SDF-SNA oil trade. The crossing was operated by al-Jabhah al-Shamiyah until recently, when it was seized by Furqat al-Sultan Suleiman Shah during SNA infighting the previous week.
10/19/22: Members of Apocî organization Tevgera Ciwanên Şoreşger ên Sûriyê (“The Syrian Revolutionary Youth Movement”) vandalized and reportedly attempted to storm the headquarters of the UN’s World Health Organization in the city of al-Qamishli. This occurred during a protest against alleged use of chemical weapons by Turkey in its war against the PKK in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. (more on the group’s recent activity here)
(source) 
(source) 10/19/22: The Alouk water station located within Turkish/SNA-controlled western al-Hasakah began pumping water to AANES-administered territories in the rest of the governorate after being shut off for 88 days. This cut off of service left hundreds of thousands of resident without their primary water supply, likely exacerbating the ongoing cholera epidemic. As is always the case with Alouk, this interruption in service has led to reciprocal finger-pointing as the water station is fed electricity from power stations operated by the regime and AANES.
10/20/22: France repatriated 15 women and 40 children from al-Hawl camp. As has been the case with (the limited) other repatriation efforts by western European countries “the children were handed over to the child care services…while the women would be transferred to the judicial authorities.” According to RIC, France has repatriated a total of 133 nationals, including 101 children.”
10/20/22: Russia repatriated 38 children, primarily orphans, from al-Hawl and al-Roj camps. Now reportedly numbering 350, Russia has repatriated far more of its nationals residing in such camps than any western European country has, though these have been exclusively children.
10/20/22: In a speech made to Turkey’s Migration Board, Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu announced that 529,000 Syrian refugees had “voluntarily returned” to Syria. Furthermore (quoted from the MoI website via Google Translate, please let me know if there are any errors):
Our Minister Mr. Süleyman Soylu underlined that returns will be one of the most fundamental agendas of migration management in the coming period, and said that 6 million people who are ready to migrate, thanks to the measures taken, remain in the areas that have been made safe in northern Syria.
Several days later, Human Rights Watch published a report detailing the arbitrary arrest, detainment, and deportation of hundreds of Syrian, from February to July of this year.
10/23/22: A document (Circular #10) put out by the AANES’s Education Authority banned the niqab (as well as use of cell phones and violence) from school campuses. This has since resulted in widespread unrest and numerous protests across Deir ez-Zour, where religiously conservative populations had engaged in similar protests last month over the AANES’s curriculum.
10/23/22: Turkish Jandarma raided an Islamic State state cell in al-Bab, reportedly killing several leaders will detaining nine other individuals. [It's interesting reading both the English and Turkish versions of the story published in state-run Anadolu, as the former includes several additional paragraphs explaining that Turkey’s intervention falls “in line with Article 51 of the UN Charter,” among other things.]
10/24/22: A video was published to social media showing Turkish Jandarma beat a Syrian man, reportedly after he had attempted to cross. This video is indicative of the brutality with which Syrians caught trying to make it across the border are treated with. The village was shot near the town of al-’Aziziyah, about ten kilometers southwest of Turkish/SNA-controlled Ras al-’Ain/Serê Kaniyê. [The tree line visible in the video’s background is located here, across the border]
10/24/22: A Turkish drone strike reportedly killed two civilians on the northern outskirts of al-Qamishli city, under two kilometers from the Turkish border. According to a rather vague statement by the AANES, the strike targeted “one of the civil institutions belonging to the Autonomous Administration.” [More footage of scene here]
10/24/22: Turkish state media reported the MIT carried out the assassination of a YPG and PKK cadre named Eyyüp Yakut (code-name “Amed Dorşin”), in some sort of operation carried out in al-Shaddadi - about as far from Turkey as you can get within AANES territory. However, head of the SDF’s Media Center Farhad Shami quickly took to Twitter pointing that the YPG had eulogized the same Amed Dorşin back in November 2021. It’s possible that Turkish intelligence sources are retroactively claiming the killing (YPG statements from 2021 don’t specify cause of death), though Daily Sabah did report the operation taking place 2021. Turkish media reports a significant amount of assassinations of figures such as Amed Dorşin with no corresponding reports on the ground or from SDF sources, raising questions as to their validity (for an example of such see the reports from ten days prior of another operation supposedly taking place in al-Shaddadi).
Other
One of Syria’s small but widely dispersed Caucasian diaspora communities:
While a majority of the victims of Turkey’s drone war in Syria (and Iraq) are combatants or members of security forces, a number of those targeted with assassination have been civilians - members of activists organizations or politicians. This report on the topic has collected the names of all such victims (#2, #9, #11, #14 were killed in Iraq).
