Turkey and Qatar Target Kurds for Ethnic Cleansing

Kurds allege Erdogan using an "anti-Israel smokescreen" to hide Turkish war crimes in Syria

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CPC Investigates

They Raise the Volume on Gaza to Drown Out Kurdish Cries for Help

Turkey and Qatar enlist Palestinian and Kuwaiti Islamists to replace the Kurds of northwest Syria with Arab settlers.

A month-long investigation by Jusoor, a new Arabic media outlet supported by the Center for Peace Communications, documents a massive campaign — steered by Turkish President Erdogan, funded by Qatar’s Emir, and administered by Kuwaiti and Palestinian Islamists — to evict Kurdish residents from their ancestral homes in northwest Syria and replace them with Syrian Arab settlers. Efforts by local and global rights groups to raise alarms have not deterred the assault.

“We escaped under fire — women and children,” recalled Naima Khalil, a refugee from the historically Kurdish town of Ifrin, in Syria’s northwest. “For 15 days we slept outdoors, under Turkish shelling. By night, we fled from town to town.” An area rights group reports that Turkey’s assault on Ifrin, which began in 2018, has reduced the Kurdish population of the city by 60 percent.

The ongoing military campaign, targeting Ifrin and other northwest Syrian towns, is accompanied by a demographic engineering project, announced by Turkish President Erdogan in 2023, to move one million Arab Syrian refugees into Kurdish areas. As part of the initiative, Qatar’s ruler agreed to finance the construction of 240,000 homes across nine Syrian provinces. In June, Qatar’s Red Crescent Society tweeted that 13 such villages had been completed, sufficient to house 22,000 Syrian Arabs. Kurdish activists denounce the project as “ethnic cleansing.”

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At least one of the settlement blocs in Ifrin was built by a Palestinian NGO: the Gaza-based, Hamas-affiliated Ajnadeen “charity” group. Last year the organization acknowledged financing the construction of 200 residential units. Abdulrahman Apo, a Kurdish politician from Ifrin, charges that 10,000 Palestinians are themselves among the settlers.

Alongside Turkish, Qatari, and Palestinian participation, Syrian investigative journalist Sardar Malla Darwish has uncovered Kuwaiti funding and operational assistance. Our own reporter in Ifrin found Kuwaiti flags and the logos of Kuwaiti Islamist NGOs identifying themselves as benefactors.  

The same operation also features a campaign against Kurdish language and culture. “They banned the Kurdish language and imposed Turkish in schools,” observed Nawaf Khalil, head of Ifrin’s Kurdish Studies Institute. Turkish-backed militias also massacred a family engaged in Nowruz celebrations, an ancient Kurdish tradition, marking “the last time Kurds could celebrate Nowruz in what was once a Kurdish-majority city,” Khalil said.

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To Kurdish observers, Erdogan’s continual portrayal of the war in Gaza as Israeli “ethnic cleansing” is a smokescreen for Turkish war crimes in Syria. “The Kurds are trying in different ways to tell the world that Erdogan is a liar and hypocrite and he’s trying to hide his crimes against the Kurds by exaggerating and lying about what’s happening in Gaza,” Darwish, the investigative journalist, said. “Erdogan thinks that if all the talk and criticism is focused on Israel’s military operation in Gaza, he can continue to oppress the Kurds as much as he wants.”

While the world turns a blind eye, despair only grows for Kurdish refugees like Naima Khalil and her family: “We don’t know what our fate will be or where we should go.”