Turkey’s reckless attacks against Northeast Syria continued unabated, with a particularly deadly strike in late February. The attack targeted the region’s indigenous Christian community, claiming the lives of three men working with the Syriac police (Sutoro) which patrols and provides security to the local Christian community in the city of Derek. Such attacks demonstrate Turkey’s lack of respect for the lives of religious minorities in the region and subsequently that it is unfit to establish a so-called ‘Safe Zone’ in Northern Syria. In no way does a police force with light weapons that protects a vulnerable religious community pose a threat to NATO’s second largest military. The attack clearly demonstrates that the people of northern Syria, in fact, who need a zone safe from Turkey.
Turkey, and its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, claims that all local forces which cooperate with the structures of the Autonomous Administration are terrorists, and marks them for execution by drone.
But the real motive for such attacks is to demoralize the indigenous communities of the region and uproot them from their historical homeland by intimidation. Using violence and deadly drone attacks to force a Syriac Christian community into diaspora amounts to active ethnic cleansing of a historical community indigenous to the region.
The region where the Turkish drone attacks have taken place is within the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which controls a region home to four and a half million people in a territory formerly controlled by the Islamic State. Empowered local citizens have built a self-governance model in the region that has one of the best religious freedom conditions in the Middle East. In addition to defeating the ISIS Caliphate, which targeted religious minorities for genocide, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of local ethnicities, have returned security to the area and ensured equal rights to all citizens regardless of faith, ethnicity, or gender. They have formed a governance structure in which half of all leaders are women. The Christian community has been key partners in the construction of this government structure, and in its protection.
As a part of the region’s commitment to multi-ethnic self determination, all ethnic and religious communities in the region are empowered to form their own self-defense units, including local police, made up of volunteer civilians. In the case of the Christian community, these civilian forces protect the religious freedom of the community and ensure its continued survival. They are not political in nature, they exist to protect their community. Protecting diversity needs to be a primary objective of the United States; thriving cultural diversity is a sustainable antidote to extremism.
The AANES is the only part of Syria that represents a real future for the people of the region who desire freedom, democracy and ethnic and religious pluralism. We look to the US to take a stronger stance and to intervene against Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of the region and its continued drone attacks. These attacks undermine the future the people are building for themselves: one with a strong pluralism that can stand in the face of extremism.
If the US fails to take a reasonable and moral stance on this problem, Turkey will continue to ethnically engineer the region to further its own geopolitical goals, endangering the existence of the region’s Christian communities and other faith communities. Such irresponsible belligerence undermines the potential for a positive and free future for the region’s inhabitants, and threatens the US’s own security interests in the ideological fight against extremism in the region and globally.
One tool the US can use to stop these attacks is its own executive order No. 13894. The US could begin by imposing sanctions on government officials in Turkey who are involved in violence against northeast Syria—including air strikes, drone strikes, assassinations, and abuses of human rights in the occupied areas—unless and until these violations cease. Failure to do so threatens the future of the people of the region, the existence of Christians in their ancient homelands, and US national and global security.