Turkish-backed extremist groups in Syria sanctioned by US – analysis

The US has continued to confront human rights abuses in Syria by targeting extremist groups that occupied in Turkish-occupied areas of Syria. The US has sanctioned the Syrian regime as well, but in the last several years a spotlight as fallen on Syrian rebel groups that became more extreme.
Over the weekend the US Treasure Department sanctioned two more Turkish-backed groups. Al-Monitor noted that these groups were “accused of forcibly displacing and oppressing the local Kurdish population in northern Syria’s Afrin region.”

The groups listed include the Suleiman Shah Brigade and Hamza Division and they are accused of exacerbating “the suffering caused by years of civil war in northern Syria and hindered the region’s recovery by engaging in serious human rights abuses against vulnerable populations.”

These groups were often part of the plethora of Syrian rebel groups that operated in northern Syria since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. After 2016 when Aleppo fell, Turkey began to mobilize and back these groups to get them to fight Kurds in Syria. Ankara adopted this cynical policy when it decided to work with Russia and Iran in the Astana process and realized the rebels had to be sidelined. To sideline them Ankara embarked on a policy of intervening in Syria and using the groups to fight Kurdish opposition, essentially destroying one opposition to Assad by getting it to fight another minority group.

The US at the time increasingly was working with Kurds and the SDF to fight ISIS. As such Kurds became a scapegoat and victim of the larger forces in Syria. In Afrin in 2018 Ankara promised the Syrian rebel groups land and refugee return if they would fight the Kurdish YPG. The result was attacks on the Kurdish and Yazidi minority.

Source » msn.com