For well more than a century, Turkey has waged an ongoing onslaught against Kurdish people in northern Syria and Iraq. Even though Turkish nationalists long denied any involvement in the killing of Armenians prior to World War I, when Kurdish unrest began rippling through the region once more in the 1960s – after several repeated skirmishes in the 1920s and 1930s – Turkish officials "reminded them" of what happened to the Armenians back in 1915.
Turkey views its efforts to be part of an operation. Since the 1980s, it has carried out cross-border operations to hunt down members of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara considers to be guerillas. In 2018, Turkey invaded a northern region of Syria known as Afrin. In 2019, it invaded a region east of Afrin, again with the aim of hunting down Syrian-Kurdish fighters.
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Currently, Turkey carries out attacks in these regions almost daily, leaving the Kurdish minority disenfranchised. But it seems Ankara does not stop at the simple use of military power – it's going after basic necessities, like water.
As temperatures soar throughout the region, Turkey has taken the harsh and unprecedented step of cutting off water supplies to the region it invaded in northeastern Syria. Approximately 1.2 million people rely on the water supply from the now-compromised Allouk station, including refugee camps, meaning Turkey's move has placed tens of thousands of Syrians at a very real risk of dying of thirst.
However, the situation is made even worse by the coronavirus pandemic. Without water to maintain basic hygiene, the spread of the virus has been gaining speed across the area. It is not only cruel to cut off water supplies during heat waves – doing so while the region battles COVID-19 is irrational and irresponsible. After all, the pandemic could very well spread deeper into Turkey, as well.
Much of the infrastructure in northern Syrian cities were damaged or destroyed by ISIS and now, while striving to survive with limited healthcare supplies and facilities, the situation is looking bleak.
Now, as Turkey apparently has shut off water supplies to the region once more, there is a growing chorus of international human rights groups warning of potential atrocities that may come as a result, especially given the mounting evidence that since Syrian militias that are backed by Turkey seized the northern regions of the country, human rights abuses have become alarmingly more frequent.
Turkey has been accused of detaining numerous people who had posted social media comments critical of its offensives in northern Syria that started in January 2018.
The US State Department has also expressed concerns about "reports of human rights abuses in Afrin." Some of these accusations including militant forces backed by Turkey abducting Kurdish and Yazidi women and holding them for ransom, destroying and vandalizing Yazidi shrines, and damaging archaeological sites and homes.
It has become evident that Turkey is unmoved by the plight of millions of innocent, struggling, and suffering civilians in northern Syria, so it is time for the international community to step up and recognize the atrocities being perpetrated in this long-suffering war-torn region of Syria and call on Western allies to push back against Turkey and their Syrian militia allies.
Without the world's intervention, scores of men, women, and children will continue to suffer and die at the hands of these acts. Inaction, standing idly by while Kurdish and Yazidi civilians suffer is as inexcusable as Turkey's irresponsible actions.
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