Over 300 olive trees were looted in the past days by Turkish-backed militants occupying the region of Afrin, Syria.
Local sources reported that militants from the Suqour al-Shamal faction came to the village of Gamrok multiple times in the past week, under the cover of night, stealing olives from trees owned by local residents as the harvest season approaches.
Furthermore, the Sultan Suleiman Shah Division, another Turkish-backed militia, looted olives from 110 trees in the town of Mabata, also at night, and sent them out of the area to be sold. Militants of the Hamza Division stole olives from 40 trees near the village of Bablit and sent them to be sold in Afrin City. Both of these militias are sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury for violations against the population of Afrin.
Since March 2018, Afrin, Syria has been occupied by Turkish military forces and their militia proxies. In the almost seven years that have passed, Afrin has seen a deluge of human rights violations and war crimes against the local population that has remained in the area, which have been extensively documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and local organizations. Furthermore, near constant infighting between Turkish-backed groups has led to the region being completely uninhabitable for any civilians at times. This combined with Turkish-organized demographic engineering has meant that the approximately 300,000 displaced persons living in camps in the nearby Shehba region cannot return to their homes in Afrin.