According to local sources, militants from the Samarkand faction of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) have cut down dozens of trees near Haj Hassane village in the countryside of Afrin. They have also imposed fees of $1 per tree on the olive tree owners of Rajo district to move through the region.
The trees were loaded onto trucks bound for Idlib province, where militants are known to sell them. At the same time, Hamza Division fighters, sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, confiscated the olive harvest belonging to a local resident, Ra’fat Hussein. They claimed he had not paid taxes they mandated for residents of the area, amounting to $2 per tree. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the number as even higher, at $6 per tree
Also recently, the Suleiman Shah faction of the SNA, sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, cut down over one thousand pine trees south of the town of Mabata in Afrin.
The Afrin region has been occupied by Turkish and Turkish-supported forces since March 2018. Extortion has become commonplace as many Turkish-backed militias have divided up the region’s territory in an attempt to monetize the wealth of Afrin’s (mostly displaced) people. In that time, the region has become a hotbed of infighting between factions, gross human rights violations, and demographic engineering, with most residents of the Kurdish-majority region fleeing, and their land forcibly possessed and transfer to other internally-displaced Syrians native to other regions in the country.