Reben Ibrahim* would disagree. An Alevi Kurd, he says his family has been fleeing Turkish state oppression for three generations. A few days ago, the 25-year-old paid a smuggler to bring him across the Syrian border with Iraq to the Kurdistan Region’s Domiz town where we met, sitting on the carpeted floor of the mosque where he is now sheltering.
“My first thought was ‘it’s over. Everyone will be killed,’” he said of Turkey launching its Operation Peace Spring last week. His fear is rooted in the stories of his grandparents and parents who have all suffered aggression at the hands of the Turkish state.
As Alevi Kurds - a minority within a minority - Reben’s family was served a double dose of persecution. Alevism is a branch of Islam and Alevis are the largest religious minority in Turkey where they are consistently denied the right to their religious education, the right to build places of worship, and are marginalized in the government and public spheres.
Reben’s grandparents lived in Turkey’s Tunceli neighborhood, a largely poor and rural region where they worked as farmers. His family didn’t join political parties or armed groups, but they were vocal in protesting for their rights to study in their native Kurdish language and practice their cultural and religious traditions.
In 1921, an Alevi Kurdish group in Dersim, as Tunceli was then known, staged an uprising known as the Kocgiri Rebellion that was crushed by the army.
His grandparents were in Dersim during the revolt and Reben remembers his grandmother telling stories of “how soldiers tore up the stomachs of women and took the fetus out to feed dogs. The girls of Dersim hanged themselves for fear of rape.”
His grandparents eventually decided to leave Turkey and moved to Afrin, a mainly Kurdish region in the northwestern corner of Syria, sometime after 1940. There, his family thought they’d found an idyll. They built a house on the side of a hill with a view of their orchard where they grew the olives for which Afrin is famous.
The enclave remained relatively sheltered for many years of the Syrian conflict that broke out in 2011, serving as a haven for thousands of families fleeing violence elsewhere in the country. Though geographically separated from other Kurdish-governed areas to the east, it joined the Kurdish-led self-autonomous administration and was secured by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) — the main Kurdish armed group in the country .
But as Kurds gained international support, especially militarily as an ally of the US-led coaliton in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), Turkey began to protest. Ankara considers the YPG a terror group with ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. Erdogan began to threaten to send his army across the border and followed through on the threats in January 2018.
“This is a national struggle. We will crush anyone who opposes our national struggle,” Erdogan said on January 21, 2018, the second day of his incursion into Afrin, dubbed Operation Olive Branch. “We are not alone… Allah is with us.”
Reben remembers fighter jets flying low in the sky at night, trying to scare the people. It worked. “They broke everybody,” said Reben.
The family’s home is now a pile of rubble, stabbed by bits of twisted rebar and littered with the shattered remains of a once happy life.
In mid-March, as the YPG withdrew from the populated areas in order to avoid a street battle that would inevitably kill hundreds of civilians, most of Reben’s family also fled, dispersing across Syria. His mother went to Aleppo, his brothers to Damascus and Qamishli. His father chose to remain in Afrin, not wanting to leave his home. If he wanted to leave now, he would have to pay a bribe to the Syrian militias who are accused of looting abandoned homes and shops and abusing the Kurdish population.
Reben went to Qamishli, the seat of Kurdish-led autonomous northeast Syria, but the conflict followed him.
On October 9, Turkey launched its Operation Peace Spring with the intent of pushing the YPG away from the border to create a “safe zone” as a buffer and a place to resettle one to two million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
“The Turkish army and its jihadists are targeting the Kurds in general and want to erase the Kurds,” said Reben.
With Turkish jets again in the sky overhead, his mother had simple advice for her son: “Just leave.”
Now a refugee, Reben wonders what’s next for him as he closely follows developments across the border. The United States, spurred into action by an outpouring of global support for the Kurds, on Thursday brokered a five-day cessation of hostilities between Turkey and the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Influential US Senator Lindsey Graham described Turkey’s planned safe zone as “ethnic cleansing” and, in a phone call with SDF commander Mazloum Kobani Abdi, pledged Congress “will stay very involved and is extremely sympathetic to the plight of the Kurds.”
This international support is the one spark of hope for the Kurds, especially after it did not take long for deadly violations to reveal the fragility of the ceasefire , though US President Donald Trump insists there is “good will on both sides” and a desire to see the truce succeed.
Reben’s grandmother once told him, when he marries and has children, to name his son Shiyar, meaning conscious or alert to the world — a world where Reben yet to find safety.
*Reben used a fake name to protect his family members still living in Syria.
Translations by Rediyar Hassan
