Rojava at War: Why Did Turkey Attack an ISIS Detention Centre Guarded by Kurdish Fighters?

Angelo Calianno reports from northeastern Syria, where the former freedom fighters against Islamist terrorism have been abandoned and forgotten

When when home-grown Kurdish defence fighters, the YPG, chased ISIS out of their cities in northeastern Syria, their new Rojava Autonomous State was widely extolled and praised. Photos of the fighters who have defeated the terrorists, mostly women, were being in newspapers around the world, and the Kurdish people were crowned the new champions of freedom against all dictatorships and extremism.

Since then, however, in just a few years, Rojava a region has been largely been forgotten, abandoned to a state of poverty and now faces, on a daily basis, new threats to its democracy. 

In response to a bomb attack in Istanbul a week earlier, Turkish military forces attacked Rojava on 19 November, hitting targets in Kobane, Raqqa, Al-Hassakah, Al- Malikiyah and Darbasiya as part of operation Claw-Sword. 

There is no evidence from current investigations that the Istanbul bombing was Kurdish in origin, and Rojava activists accuse the Turkish government of ‘engineering’ the bombing in order to have a pretext for a new invasion.

Operation Claw-Sword —which according to Turkish news agencies was supposed to focus on military targets — has hit grain silos, oil wells (one of Rojava’s main key resources) and killed several civilians including journalist Issam Abdullah, who was hit during an air raid while he was interviewing farmers in the countryside of Al-Malikiyah.

On the evening of 23 November, a new drone attack hit the Al-Hol Refugee Camp, a detention centre where families of the most radical members of ISIS are held, killing nine Kurdish guards. The camp contains 53,000 people, 80% of whom are women and children up to 12 years of age. The inhabitants of Al-Hol are not charged with anything but the Kurdish security forces consider them a security threat.

Byline Times visited Al-Hol to find out why Turkey had attacked this particular place.

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Gihan, one of the camp management staff, thinks the attack on the guards was deliberate:

“The missiles did not hit the inside of the camp but the perimeter where the camp guards were,” he told Byline Times. “And this was no mistake. The target was our military. By attacking the guards they gave some people a chance to escape, just as happened in the Hassakah camp, also during a Turkish air raid. In this case the escapees were caught almost immediately. By letting potential terrorists escape, Turkey thinks it can destabilize our government from within.” 

Inside the camp, the scene is dominated by women, all of them are wearing full burqas except for a few very small girls,. None of them want to reveal their names but all of them complain about the conditions under which they live.