Mar 4, 2019

Ever since the Turkish military and allied factions from the Free Syrian Army drove the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) out of Kurdish-dominated Afrin in March 2017, there has been almost no independent reporting on how the enclave is faring under Turkish occupation. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch are among a handful of international bodies that have offered valuable insight on the massive human rights abuses — rape, theft, extortion, kidnappings and the forced displacement of locals in favor of Syrian Arabs bused in from areas retaken by the Syrian Arab Army — allegedly inflicted by the FSA under Turkey’s watch. The UN said some of these actions amount to war crimes. But aside from propaganda being churned out from opposing sides, even less is known about a low intensity insurgency that is being waged by several Kurdish armed groups against the FSA and Turkish forces inside Afrin.

Using satellite imagery and open sources, the online investigative media outlet Bellingcat has sought to lift the veil on the 10-month insurgency in a report that was published on March 1. The study focuses on the attacks claimed by three anti-FSA groups. They are the YPG, Ghadab al-Zaitoun (Wrath of Olives) and Hezen Rizgariya Efrine (Afrin Liberation Forces). Together they have claimed responsibility for almost 220 attacks carried out between late March 2018 and the end of January 2019.

Alexander McKeever, a master's student at New York’s City University who gathered and analyzed the data, told Al-Monitor that the the groups had claimed 25 more attacks in February. He was able to independently verify half of them. Amid the forest of technical details, three aspects of the insurgency stand out: The actors, their methods and the impact of their attacks, all of which have wide ramifications for the broader conflict between Turkey and the YPG as well as their respective relations with the other main stakeholders in the eight-year-old Syrian conflict: Russia, Iran, the regime and the United States.

The YPG is widely lauded for its steely courage in the US-led coalition’s battle against the Islamic State. Its men and women fighters have with their Arab allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces brought the caliphate to its knees and shrunk its once vast territory to the hamlet of Baghouz, where the final assault against the jihadists is currently unfolding. But in Afrin, Bellingcat suggests, Syrian Kurdish forces may be displaying a darker side they are presumably less keen to advertise.

Wrath of Olives, McKeever observes, “gained notoriety for the their highly controversial kidnappings and executions of FSA members and suspected collaborators, a grim hallmark that has differentiated them from official YPG activity in Afrin.” The word “official” here is key because, as McKeever noted, there is speculation that both Wrath of Olives and the Afrin Liberation Forces are front groups for the YPG. If true, the tactic mirrors the modus operandi of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the rebel group that has been fighting Turkish forces since 1984 and helped found, organize and staff the YPG. The PKK is believed to use front groups such as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons for its urban operations, in which civilians are sometimes targeted. The practice gives the PKK plausible deniability while at the same time forcing the government to back off. Wrath of Olives has published some of its execution videos online. At least two of its victims were allegedly civilians accused of serving as informants for the Turkish military.