Afrinpost-Rebounds
A pro-Turkish media and the Muslim Brotherhood have acknowledged that the Turkish authorities in the southern province of Sanlıurfa deported Syrian refugees about 10 days ago to Aleppo countryside, as part of their efforts to resettle the indigenous Kurds in Afrin or other indigenous components in the areas of “Sere Kaniye / Ras Al Ain” and “Gire Spi/ Tal Abyad”.
One of the deportees, Mohammed Tothat told a pro-Turkish media on Monday, November 25, that the Turkish authorities had chosen them between a year in prison in the province of Aintab and returning to Syria.
On November 15, Turkish police launched a search operation targeting Syrian refugee gatherings in the city of Urfa, targeting cafes (Babel, Al-Basha, Nofra, Rotana) in the city center, where 20 young people were arrested, most of them working in these cafes. They hold a temporary protection card (Kimlik) for the province of Urfa and have families and children.
The refugees added that they were asked to sign directly on a paper written in Turkish, where they were told that it was a case to attend the police station for some questions, according to his account, and did not ask the police whether they have permission to work, contrary to accounts that the reason for their detention and deportation that they do not have a work permit.
Mohammed Tohme said that the Turkish authorities did not explain to them also the reason for their detention and choice between imprisonment and deportation. He explained that they were taken first to Harran camp in Urfa, then to the province of Aintab from where they were transferred to the Bab al-Salama border crossing with Syria, where they were released there.
Mohammed Tohme is only one of hundreds of thousands of refugees Turkey is seeking to settle in northern Syria, where she recently announced that 370,000 Syrians have returned to the areas they occupy there, in an effort to convince the world of its efforts to forcibly return Syrians to northern Syria, where they seek to resettle these people in the land of the Kurds, Arabs, Syrians and Assyrians the indigenous people of the region, under the threatening Europe to send them if they do not agree.
In a report on July 27, Human Rights Watch confirmed that Turkey is obliged under customary international law not to be forcibly return. The law prohibits the return of anyone to a place where they would be in real danger, accusing Ankara of detaining a number of refugees and forcing them to sign forms and papers for voluntary return to Syria.
Mohammed Tohme said that a number of detainees are still being held in the province of Aintab, and that only 14 young people who entered Syria after they signed the deportation decision, because according to him, no one can afford to injustice imprisonment for a year without any reason.
He stressed that all those who entered Syria were not forced to go to specific areas inside Syria, by the Turkish authorities, where some of them went to Afrin and others to the cities of Azaz and Bab, in Aleppo countryside.
