YPJ Public Office
To the media and public opinion,
Despite the severe complications resulting from the catastrophic earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey, as well as the international community’s appeals to deescalate violence and facilitate relief efforts, the Turkish occupation’s belligerent practices against our territories in north and eastern Syria persist as a top priority for the ruling party in Turkey and its armed mercenary groups occupying northern Syria. Once more, the occupation and its mercenaries have opted to supplant sympathy for the earthquake victims with war and hatred against our regions, thereby ratcheting up their aggressive attacks.
Following the catastrophic earthquake on February 6th, the Turkish occupation and its mercenaries perpetrated 24 armed attacks, employing heavy weaponry and tanks. Furthermore, Turkish reconnaissance aircraft executed two strikes against civilian populations in our territories. Additionally, records indicate that the Turkish reconnaissance aircraft flew over the region on no less than 348 occasions, while Turkish military aircraft and helicopters flagrantly breached Syrian airspace 27 times.
Furthermore, the occupation has once again resorted to its dirty intelligence tactics, as evidenced by its involvement in a detonation of IEDs in a civilian car in the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood in Aleppo and another in the city of Hasakah.
The hostile attacks perpetrated by Turkey throughout February caused the martyrdom of four innocent civilians, among them a 70-year-old elderly displaced person from Afrin. Furthermore, three individuals were injured, including a woman. Such aggressions also caused severe damage to civilians’ properties and farmlands, preventing them from accessing their crops.
In an attempt to conceal their reprehensible crimes, the Turkish occupation has yet again resorted to fabricating lies to justify their egregious killing of civilians. Turkish intelligence-affiliated media outlets have propagated the unsubstantiated claim that they have “killed” a hypothetical member of our forces, Khalil Mounji, whom they accuse of being responsible for the Istanbul attack. We categorically assert that the mentioned person has no affiliation with our forces and is, in fact, a civilian far removed from military and political activities. This murder crime is added to the list of crimes committed by the occupation against our people, which persist to this day.
As the Turkish occupation persists in its brutal aggressions that claim more lives in the region, our forces are abiding by their moral and humanitarian commitments to respond in a manner that prioritizes the provision of essential aid to those affected people. Such measures include the exercise of self-restraint and refraining from succumbing to Turkish provocations.
The Turkish occupation believes that the preoccupation of the international community and humanitarian organizations with the recent earthquake disaster is a timely opportunity to deflect attention from mounting pressure to cease its vicious attacks against our territories and to dissuade Ankara from proceeding with preparations for a potential invasion shortly. Such actions occur amid the absence of viable international legal mechanisms to hold the occupation and its mercenary forces accountable for their atrocities against the region’s inhabitants, encompassing forced displacement, demographic manipulation, and targeted killings.
Based on that, we reiterate our plea to the international community and international human rights organizations to perform their functions by implementing efficient and genuine mechanisms that deter the Turkish occupation’s ongoing aggressions, given the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the region and the mounting security threats posed by the ISIS terrorist organization. The latter is trying to exploit the dire humanitarian conditions caused by the earthquake disaster to reorganize, regroup, and perpetrate mass-scale attacks.
SDF Media Center
March 1, 2023
