Afrinpost-Special

On February 28, 2018, the Turkish invasion and the armed Islamic militia affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Failaq al-Sham militia, occupied the border town of Meydan Akbes in Rajo district and have since practiced various abuses against the remaining indigenous Kurds.

There are three militia military headquarters in the town, as well as a central prison, which was opened on the first day of the occupation, where it was adopted as a point of interrogation and investigation of the Kurdish youth, as well as the practice of various forms of torture, according to witnesses who passed from the notorious prison.

Salil al-Khalidi, a Turkman of origin from Homs, leads the so-called “security” of the militia, where the latter controls everything in the town, and Salil initially harbored camels (6 heads), but with improved material status after the looting, he left camel breeding and ran agricultural businesses after he took about 50 hectares of fertile farmland around the town.

As for the looting, the militia after the occupation to remove the railway line that passes from the town, and an estimated distance of 500 meters, in the area between Meydan Akbes and the village of Kharabi Suluk.

The total number of houses in Meydan Akbes is close to 500 houses, where the town was full of Kurdish residents, but the Turkish invasion pushed the majority of them to forced displacement, as a result of deliberate hostilities against the indigenous Kurds, and the vast majority of its residents went to the areas of Shahba, Aleppo and others.

Later, only 125 families of the original Kurdish population returned to their homes and farms in the town, while settlers from Homs, mainly Turkmen, occupied the homes of some 375 Kurdish displaced persons.

As for the olive fields and agricultural land belonging to the displaced, they are taken over by the leaders of the militia “Failaq al-Sham” and his gunmen in full.

Like other villages and towns in Afrin, the natural woods and forests are subjected to systematic and destructive logging operations against forest trees, especially hawthorn, oaks and others, to be driven to the Yali Shella valley, where the militia leader opened a plant to produce charcoal from forest woods.

The gunmen also set up a firewood collection center in the nearby village of Midana, from where it is sent to Idlib for sale.

The building of the famous train station turned the militia into a warehouse for weapons and ammunition, while its school turned into a religious hospice frequented by extremist settlers to cultivate in the minds of their children and children of the Kurds strict religious teachings, under the supervision of teachers from the settlers themselves.

The militia is committing multiple crimes against the Kurdish people. On Wednesday, 6 November, an armed group of the militia “Faileq al-Sham” stormed the houses of a number of Kurdish citizens, and aggressively attacked them, including a pregnant woman.

The correspondent of “Afrinpost” in the region that an armed group of nine gunmen led by Abu Turki (Mahmoud Qandi) from Turkmens of Homs, stormed at night the house of the citizen “Shaaban Hamid Kumi”, and assaulted him and his guest, “Farouk Khaled” and his wife Seifin who is pregnant, leading to the intervention of neighbors who were also beaten by the armed group.

Afrinpost learned from its sources that the perpetrators threatened the victims with death if the lawsuit filed by the Military Police militia was not dropped, which in turn destroyed the medical report attached to the complaint and pressured the victims to change their testimony and drop their lawsuit.