It appears every time that Turkey has a high level meeting with US officials or a call with a US official Turkish state media is mobilized to invent or discover some new “YPG/PKK terror.”
by Seth Franzman for jpost
Turkey’s state media claimed last week that a “mass grave” of 61 bodies was found in Afrin in Syria, an area that Turkey illegally occupies and which it ethnically cleansed of Kurds in 2018. The Turkish state media claims, without any evidence that “the victims were executed by the US-backed PKK/YPG terrorist organization.”
In fact, say many Kurds, the victims were people killed by Turkey who had been buried in rows of marked graves until Turkey bulldozed the grave markers in 2018. Now Ankara has discovered a grave it allegedly desecrated and is inventing false reports.
The overall goal was to divert the Syrian rebel cause from fighting the Syrian regime to fighting Kurdish forces that Turkey deemed “terrorists.” These same Kurdish forces were fighting ISIS and were backed by the US in eastern Syria. To paint them as “terrorists” Ankara has invented a number of crimes attributed to them, all of which lack evidence.
It appears every time that Turkey has a high level meeting with US officials or a call with a US official Turkish state media is mobilized to invent or discover some new “YPG/PKK terror” and then after the meeting the incident, which was apparently invented, disappears from coverage. The coverage is also usually in English to convince western audiences, with no real push in Arabic or Turkish about the same issue.
Ankara has never allowed independent investigators into Afrin to study these alleged attacks and crimes. Ankara does arrange media tour junkets where it controls access and controls media similar to Iran or North Korea in terms of what is allowed to be covered in Turkish-occupied areas.
Unlike other areas that the international community calls “occupied,” such as Hebron in the West Bank, there are no UN special rapporteurs appointed for Afrin and no temporary international presence there to examine what is going on. This is largely because the international community has given Turkey’s occupation and ethnic cleansing a stamp of approval unlike the way the international community monitored ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s.