Afrinpost – Special
Islamic militias affiliated with the Turkish occupation and the Muslim Brotherhood who call themselves the “Syrian National Army / Free Army” take advantage of the difficult conditions in which the people of the Kurdish Afrin region live, in light of the Turkish occupation, where job opportunities and obscene costs increase, so networks have been activated that claim to work in smuggling people to Turkey for large sums, but the smuggling operations end at the border only, by handing people over to Turkish solders.
In the context, the Afrinpost correspondent in Raju district stated that the gunmen of the “Rijal Al-Harb” militia are defrauding people on the pretext of smuggling to Turkey, in border villages, and take up to $ 700 for a person.
Stressing that the smuggling process often fails, the gunmen take over the process of transporting people from the city of Afrin to the border villages of “Meydana” of Raju, where a smuggler receives them and he is a militant of the same militia, and in turn the smuggler hands them over to the Turkish border guards who arrest them directly.
Regarding the most recent smuggling incidents, the Afrinpost correspondent in Raju stated that a group of settlers from Al-Ghouta paid $ 2100 to this smuggling network, but they were arrested upon passing the borders, and received bad treatment from the elements of Turkish solders.
In another incident, the Kurdish citizen, “Shukri Muhammad” from the village of “Barbaneh” of the Raju district, paid one thousand and five hundred dollars to the smugglers, but he was arrested by the Turkish border guards, while the smuggling network did not returned any of the money though the operation failed.
The Human Rights Organization in Afrin-Syria issued a statement, on March 15, 2020, in which a statistic mentioned the number of victims who lost their lives on the Syrian border, at the hands of the Turkish border guards, and indicated that they number (447) refugees, among them (83) Children, and (56) women, and that the number of Syrians wounded by gunfire or assault reached (420) Syrian citizens.
