Afrinpost – Special
Yazidi villages in the occupied Kurdish region of Afrin in northern Syria suffer from multiple persecution, as militants of the Turkish occupation and the Muslim Brotherhood who call themselves the “Syrian National Army / Free Army” are fighting them for their national belonging first and religious second.
One example of these villages is the village of Basoufan, which belongs to the Shirawa district, and was estimated by 130 families before the Syrian civil war in 2011, which is the same number of homes, all of which are authentic families who have lived in the village for hundreds of years.
As for the occupation of the Kurdish region, and the domination of religious extremism over it, 50 families from Al-Ghouta, Damascus and Idlib Governorate settled in it, while the village was occupied by the “Failaq Al-Sham” militia that is directly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, The village was occupied on the eighteenth of March 2018, on the same day of the Turkish military occupation of the center of Afrin.
The Yazidi Village, according to sources from the village, spoke to “Afrinpost”, during the era of “autonomous-administration”, the public buildings were preserved with all their contents. A newspaper was added to each building separately, which includes an inventory of everything inside the buildings associated with it, then added some improvements to it, but as usual the settlers destroyed most of it.
Immediately after the settlers entered the village, they closed the Yazidi religious school, and instead opened a school to teach the Islamic religion, while the families are forced to send their children, and those who refuse to send their children to that school are treated harshly, and the house of one of the displaced from the village was turned into a mosque, and they imposed on women and girls to wear Islamic dress.
The Yezidis were subjected to intimidation, imposing royalties on the pretext of possessing weapons or dealing with “autonomous-administration” and other ready-made charges. The settlers, under the protection of the Turkish occupation forces, cut about 1,300 olive trees, vines, nuts and almonds, to establish a Turkish military base south of the village.
The settlers also destroyed Sheikh Ali’s shrine about two months ago after digging inside it a year ago in search of archaeological finds.
Sources say that to save face, the gunmen released some of the kidnapped citizens, and rumored that they won’t bother the Yezidis when practicing their religious rites.
But the reality is completely different to this, where Islamic militia gunmen pressure the Yezidis to leave the village, search the residents ’phones from time to time, and reside the new settlers with Yezidi families who are forced to accept this under penalty of the attack, as happened with the young“ Dilkesh Omar Arabo ”who refused housing a family coming from Idlib in his house, so he received three bullets from “Failaq Al-Sham” gunmen, and he is still being treated, and the property of the displaced residents of the village (the Yazidi Kurds) were looted, stolen and seized by the settlers.
Kurdish, Syrian and international human rights organizations accuse the occupied Turkish forces and their armed militias in Afrin of committing all kinds of violations that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of the region, in an effort to force them to leave their homes and lands to implement a process of demographic change.
In addition to that, the militants affiliated with Ankara built mosques in Yazidi villages and obliged the remaining Yezidis to visit it and make them to convert to Islam. Those practices reinforce fears of the growing threat of extremism and the transformation of the region into a new focus for militant Islamist groups, as western reports have spoken of Turkey’s recruitment of former fighters within ISIS ranks in its operation against Afrin, and a video was circulated on the Internet showing militants in Afrin chanting songs like those of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
During the era of “Self-Administration”, official departments and schools were closed in celebration of the holiday, like all religious holidays related to the Islamic or Christian religion, in addition to organizing a central celebration, as it sought to protect the Kurdish Yezidi component and provide all the capabilities available to it in order to revive the ancient Kurdish religion and prevent its extinction, after the global terror attempt to eliminate it at its center in Shengal, through the ISIS attack in 2014.
After four years, ISIS attacks were repeated, but this time in Afrin, and another dress called the “Syrian National Army” affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to eliminate religious diversity and the tolerant model in Afrin, which was an example religions, sects and ethnicities coexisting away from the culture of killing that extremists spread it like ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood sponsored by the Turkish occupation.
In this regard, Vice-President of the American Committee for International Religious Freedom, Anurima Bargava, and commissioner of the committee, Nadine Mainza, in a report published by the American magazine “Newsweek”, pointed out the danger of the current Turkish moves and the cooperation that Ankara is carrying out with the terrorist organization “ISIS” to eliminate the Kurds .
They said, “The Yazidis in Syria who have faced a devastating campaign of genocide at the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are suffering, again – but this time by NATO allies.
They stated that they and the other vulnerable minorities have borne the brunt of the violence against civilians, with the Turkish army and the “Free Syrian Army” invading and occupying a large area of northern Syria, starting in Afrin in early 2018 and continuing to this day.
And they continued: “Just three months ago, in April 2020, Yazidis witnessed the village of Basovan in terror, where a group of the Free Syrian Army destroyed the Sheikh Ali shrine – unfortunately, one of at least 18 Yezidi holy sites destroyed in the past two years, alongside with 80 percent of Yazidi shrines across the country. ”
“During that same period, human rights organizations, the United Nations and civilians on the ground documented horrific and repeated violations of the Yazidi, Christian and Kurdish minorities in the region – atrocities that led to the forcible displacement of tens of thousands of their homeland, and are still unable or simply afraid to return to their homes. Since Turkey expanded its occupation over a larger area of land starting in October 2019, they and their allies in the Free Syrian Army have escalated violence against these civilians who remain – and reports of killings, rape, and kidnappings are still emerging.
