Feb 25, 2020

Turkey’s pressure campaign on Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria took a fresh sinister turn this week when Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces reportedly halted service at the Alok pumping station in the Turkish-occupied town of Ras al-Ain. The facility supplies water to approximately 460,000 people, including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Syrians as well as Islamic State captives and their families.

“The Turkish-backed sources entered the water station [Feb. 24] and forced it to stop its work and threw out the technicians as well,” wrote Sozda Ahmed of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria. She told Al-Monitor via the Rojava Information Center in emailed comments, “As a result the city of al Hasakah, Tell Tamar and the rest of the Hasakah region — including Hol and Shedadi — have been left without water. Arisha camp, Hol camp [housing Islamic State fighters’ families] and Washokani camp [housing internally displaced Syrians from Ras al-Ain] have all been affected.”

Ankara has long been accused of seeking to suffocate the Syrian Kurdish-run region economically as well as militarily and politically, all part of a campaign to torpedo Kurdish aspirations of self-rule. Turkey's borders with the Kurdish-administered northeast from Manbij all the way to the Iraqi border further east remain sealed, including to humanitarian organizations.

“Water is a weapon that Turkey has used against Syria in the past and it will likely continue to do so,” Fabrice Balanche, Syria expert and associate professor at France’s Lyon II University, told Al-Monitor.

With all eyes trained on the rebel-held province of Idlib, where Russian-backed Syrian government forces and the Turkish army have been clashing since the start of this month, the Alok affair has largely slipped under the radar. A Russian delegation was expected to arrive in Ankara tomorrow to break a deadlock over Turkish demands for a cease-fire as close to a million displaced civilians remain massed along the Turkish border, reported the state-run Anadolu news agency.