Refugees' Family Killed by Turkish Air Strikes in Kurdish Region of Syria

[Matan]

A whole Family of 8 Refugees, who had fled Islamist Terrorist Gangs from Idlib, were Killed by Turkey's Air Strikes at the Kurdish Region of Syria, according to the London - Headquartered Observatory for Human Rights in Syria.

At least 11 Civilian People were Killed at the beginning of that Turkish Military Invasion, the well known NGO reported.

[Ocean]

.

See, f.ex., World-famous Robert Fisk's reporting with Facts from the spot at Afrin area, just published at "Independent" NewsMedia :



<< NewsWorldMiddle East

Inside Afrin, the true victims of Turkey's invasion of northern Syria are revealed - refugees, babies, women and children

Exclusive: In part three of his Inside Syria series, and the first Western media report from Afrin since the start of the Turkish offensive, Robert Fisk shows just how ‘surgical’ is the attack on ‘terrorists’ in Operation Olive Branch

Robert Fisk Maabatli, northern Syria @indyvoices


When Taha Mustafa al-Khatr, his wife Amina, his two daughters Zakia and Safa and son Sulieman went to bed in the tiny village of Maabatli, they placed their shoes outside the door. Most Middle Eastern families do the same.

It’s a tradition and a sign of cleanliness in the home. The cheap plastic slippers were still there, of course, when the Turkish shell hit their house at one in the morning – and when I arrived a few hours later, I found the same shoes, a few blown down the stairs but most still neatly lined up next to each other. Did one of the daughters choose the slippers with the plastic bows? Even the rescue workers – such as they are in the Kurdish province of Afrin – didn’t touch the shoes.

They left one of the blood-soaked bedspreads where it was in the rain under the collapsed roof of the cheap breeze-block house. The bodies, of course, had gone.

Since the identities of the victims are known – not, of course, that of the Turkish gunner who slaughtered this family – we should, perhaps, be better acquainted with them. Taha was 40 years old, his wife Amina the same age, Zakia was 17 and her bother Suliemann just 14. Safa, who is 19, survived – miraculously, with only wounds to her hands – but of course she is now an orphan.

(...)

Taha’s uncle already lived in the hilltop village and he seems to have put his refugee relatives in his storeroom – it was filled with the wreckage of sacks of grain, a fridge and frozen vegetables. The bodies must have been unimaginable.

----------------------------

“You come to our hospital here in Afrin to find out what happened,” Dr Jawan Palot, director of the Afrin Hospital, remarked to me with cynicism, well aware that The Independent was the first Western news organisation to visit Afrin since the Turkish attack. “You should see the dead when they come in – and the state of the wounded with the blood on them.” And there came forth the usual photographs of ferociously broken corpses. [NOONE PUBLISHED]

And there followed, too, in the Afrin Hospital, a maudlin tour of the wards where the survivors of Turkey’s assault on the “terrorists” of Afrin, which began on 20 January, lay in their beds.

There was Mohamed Hussein, a 58-year old farmer from Jendeeres, with head wounds and a closed eye, almost killed when the roof of his house caved in under air attack on 22 January. And Ahmad Kindy, eight years younger, who took his family out of the village when Turkey’s Olive Branch first cast its shadow over the land early on 21 January, but who unwisely returned and was hit in the back by shrapnel. “There were no YPG fighters there,” he said.

But what if there were? Does that justify the pain of 15-year old Dananda Sido from the village of Adamo, terribly wounded in the chest and legs who turns from us in tears when we try to speak to her in the Afrin Hospital? Or that of 20-year old Kifah Moussa, who was working in her family’s chicken farm at Maryameen when Turkish planes dropped a bomb on the building at midday, killing an entire family of eight people beside her? She was hit in the chest. She smiles bravely at Dr Palot and myself, although it is unclear if she knows that her brother is among the dead.

Then there is the eighth-grade Kurdish schoolboy Mustafa Khaluf, also from Jendeeres, who heard the Turkish planes coming above his home and suffered severe leg wounds in the air strike. Close to him lies seven-year old Aya Nabo, with severe chest wounds, and who turns towards the wall beside her bed rather than talk to her doctor. Her sister says she was hit in the street on 22 January. After a while, it becomes a kind of obscenity to demand, constantly, the circumstances of this suffering. We all know who did this.


It is, however, almost equally obscene to recall the official Turkish version of this little massacre – for that is what it was for 34 civilians whose bodies were taken to the Afrin Hospital alone – which states that more than 70 Turkish jets bombed YPG Kurdish militias in Syria on 21 January. The Turkish news agency Anadolu stated blandly that Turkish aircraft bombed more than 100 “targets” – including an “airfield” (mysteriously unnamed) – on the first day of the attacks. The operations supposedly targeted YPG “barracks, shelters, positions, weapons, vehicles and equipment”.

(...)

To make his own calculated point, Dr Polat, who says he was studying medicine in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk when he decided to return to Afrin in 2014 “to help my people in the war”, prints out his entire hospital records from the 21 January to midday on the 26 January and gives them to The Independent.

According to Dr Polat, he had received only four YPG fighters dead and two wounded on the first day of the Turkish assaults, another seven fighters and nine wounded later in the week. Because these are real people, not just statistics, there is probably a journalistic duty to record at least some of the lives -- and deaths -- of these poor civilians.

Dipping into the hospital files – and taking names at random – I find that among the 49 civilian wounded brought here, were three-year-old Hamida Brahim al-Hussein, from Maryameen, who was wounded in the head in the chicken farm attack in which Kifah Moussa was injured. And two-year-old Hassan al-Hassan (wounded in the head). Then there was 70-year-old Asia Sheikh Murad from Shiya – with head wounds on 23 January. And 46-year-old Khaled Mohamed Ali Abdul Qadr with head wounds – again, for houses collapsed on their owners – in Maryameen. And Hamid Battal, aged 30, from Fkeiro and Ghengis Ahmad Khalil, whose warrior name did not prevent the 20-year-old from suffering stomach wounds at Midan Ekbes. Sudqi Abdul Rahman, who is 47, was wounded in the leg by shrapnel at Ruzio-Jendeeres on 25 January. A 75-year-old, Shamsa Moussa, is listed as receiving “multiple broken bones” in the village of Rajow on 23 January.


The list of the dead – 10 children, seven women, 17 men – is bleaker, for the hospital had not bothered to catalogue their wounds. They include infants. One-year old Wael al-Hussein, a refugee (who surely could not have known it) from the village of Jebbarah, was killed on 21 January, six-year old Moussab al-Hussein from Idlib (clearly from another refugee family) on the same day. 60-year-old Fatima Mohamed from the village of Arabo was killed in Jendeeres on 23 January. Abdulkader Menam Hamo from Jamo was killed on 24 January.

There will be no war memorials for them – as there are for Kurdish fighters in the military graveyard some miles from Afrin, most of them killed fighting Isis – and no record of their deaths, save, perhaps, for the cold lists in Dr Polat’s files -- each stamped, in Kurdish, “Avrin Hospital”. ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/afrin-turkey-invasion-syria-enclave-kurds-ypg-airstrike-war-civil-a8182266.html










>>

[Fengxu]

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Turkish op in Afrin leaves ‘grim tally’ of children killed, ‘fleeing families’ in Syria – UNICEF

Published time: 26 Jan, 2018 20:49
Edited time: 27 Jan, 2018 12:49

The number of children killed in Syria has risen dramatically over the past two weeks, according to UNICEF’s envoy in the country, who said youngsters have been hardest hit.

“The grim tally of children killed in Syria in the past two weeks has increased daily as violence escalates in several areas across the country,” Fran Equiza, UNICEF Representative in Syria, said in a statement titled “Is the world becoming numb to the killing of children?” on Friday.


According to Equiza, UNICEF received reports about at least 11 children killed in the Afrin area in northern Syria. The official didn’t specify when or how exactly the children were killed or who was behind the violence. However, Kurdish-dominated Afrin was the exact area where Turkey launched its operation ‘Olive Branch’ on January 20.

Since the launch of the operation in Afrin, the Kurds say the campaign had claimed innocent lives. Ankara, however, maintains there have been no civilian casualties. According to the latest numbers from Turkey, more than 340 members of “terrorist groups” have been neutralized as the operation marks one week.


“In Afrin, families are fleeing to other areas within the district, seeking protection in camps already crowded with over 125,000 previously displaced people, living in shockingly difficult conditions and exposed to harsh winter weather,” Equiza noted.

According to the UNICEF official, families are “confined to the basements of their buildings” due to intense violence outside. “Wars have laws and these laws are being broken every single day in Syria,” he wrote in an emotional appeal, adding that all conflicting parties should provide safe passage for civilians who want to leave the affected area.

Yet almost seven years into the conflict in Syria, children still continue to be the hardest hit by “unprecedented destruction, displacement and death,” according to Equiza. “They have lost lives, homes and childhoods. Enough is enough,” he added

...

https://www.rt.com/news/417116-unicef-children-violence-syria/ 

[Petra]

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<<...the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights ...said at least 51 civilians, including 17 children, were killed in the offensive on Sunday>> by the Turkish Army at the Syrian Kurdish Region around Afrin City, reported "AP" press agency, cited by "Washington Post".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/turkish-forces-target-strategic-hill-near-syrias-afrin/2018/01/28/f869b25e-041c-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html

Today, probably, the total number of Civilian Victims may be quite bigger...

[Norma]

"Depuis le 20 janvier, ....selon l'OSDH.....68 civils dont 21 enfants ont péri dans les bombardements turcs sur Afrine, a ajouté l'ONG".

(.....)

Les avions turcs ont survolé mercredi matin la ville d'Afrine, a constaté un correspondant de l'AFP, et les bombardements dans les environs de la cité ont gagné en intensité ces derniers jours, a-t-il précisé.

Mais les combats les plus violents se déroulent principalement dans le nord et l'ouest de la région. Ils sont accompagnés de  tirs d'artillerie et de frappes aériennes turques, selon une ONG, l'Observatoire syrien des droits de l'Homme (OSDH).

 A Afrine, quelque 15.000 personnes fuyant les combats ont été déplacées dans la région, tandis qu'un millier ont trouvé refuge dans la province voisine d'Alep, selon Ursula Mueller, secrétaire générale adjointe de l'ONU, chargée des Affaires humanitaires.

'Les civils meurent'


Dans le principal hôpital de la ville d'Afrine, les blessés continuent d'affluer, a constaté mercredi un correspondant de l'AFP.

Allongée sur un lit d'hôpital, une vieille dame au visage ridé pleure bruyamment alors qu'un médecin tente d'examiner son crâne.

Une infirmière demande à un jeune garçon d'ouvrir la main pendant qu'elle enroule un bandage, tandis qu'une de ses collègues lui nettoie une plaie à la jambe.

"Tout le monde sait que les civils meurent", tonnait déjà mardi soir un vieillard dans l'hôpital après avoir perdu 12 membres de sa famille.

Une famille de quatre personnes est venue récupérer le corps du patriarche, 80 ans. La tête posée contre le cercueil, une femme pleure." (.....)





http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/syrie-l-offensive-turque-se-poursuit-a-afrine-des-milliers-de-deplaces-31-01-2018-2191095_24.php

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<<'This is a massacre': Turkey's bombs drive families into caves

By Waffa Munayyer, Joe Sterling, and Eliza Mackintosh, CNN

Updated 1512 GMT (2312 HKT) February 1, 2018

... Turkey's cross-border military offensive against US-backed Kurdish militias has driven civilians living in the northwestern Syrian enclave underground. An estimated 16,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, which has been punctuated by relentless airstrikes and shelling, according to the United Nations


Footage obtained exclusively by CNN captures the city's deserted streets -- littered with crumpled cars, debris and gaping holes where shops once stood.

"We don't know where to go," says Mohammed Khaled, 10, speaking in Kurdish.

"The airplane has been dropping bombs for five days now. They are dropping missiles and bombs. My dad says not to go out because of the war planes and so we are sleeping in the huts. All our homes are destroyed."

Khaled stands outside one of the structures where civilians are seeking shelter. Children mill around behind him, restless. ...


Um Muhammed, Khaled's mother, asks why Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is bombing her people."What did we do to him?" she says in Arabic.

"We lost our homes our children, nothing is left ... why would this happen to us? Is not this a shame that children have to live like that? We are human beings, are we not? Why are they doing this to us?"

(.....)

"On Wednesday, the SDF said an "invasion army" of Turkish fighters and terrorists with Al-Nusra, al Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria, pounded Afrin with Katyusha rockets, targeting Afrin's largely civilian Ashrafia neighborhood and wounded people were taken to hospitals. The SDF said civilians, from children to the elderly, were injured.

 "Right now we are overwhelmed with injured and killed civilians," says Dr. Jawan Muhammed, general manager of the hospital in Afrin.

"Our hospital is unable to cope, Our surgery rooms are overwhelmed. We conduct 18 surgeries a day. We are using up all our medical supplies because of the overwhelming number of casualties as a result of indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery fire."


(.....)

The people hiding in Afrin's caves ....

One woman asks, "What are the planes wanting from us? What are they bombing us for? What do they want from us and what do they want from the little children?"

A young girl named Yasmin went into hiding with her mother and her brothers after her father was killed.

"It is really dark here. We are so scared because it is really noisy. They are conducting airstrikes. What did we do to them? We are just kids. Why is this our fault?" she asks.

Fatima Muhammed, bundled in a red sweater, her hair wrapped in a purple scarf, is among about a dozen people hiding out in the same cave.

"This is a massacre," she says, breaking down in tears. "Please convey our message we are pleading with the international community to stop the killing of the civilians stop the airstrikes and the war against us."

(.....)





http://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/01/middleeast/syria-kurds-assault-civilians-intl/index.html



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