The Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) released the following statement condemning Turkey's air strikes on cities in North and East Syria and Northern Iraq.
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On 20 November at midnight, Turkish warplanes began bombing hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets in and around Kobanê, including the village of Belûniyê in Shahba, southwest of Kobanê, which is now populated by displaced Kurds from Afrin, as well as the village of TeqilBeqil near Qerecox in Dêrik in the eastern part of the Autonomous Region of North and East Syria. Turkish warplanes also targeted the wheat depot in the region of Dahir al-Arab near Zirgan and areas in the Qendil Mountains and Asos Mountains in South Kurdistan (North Iraq).
The terrorist attack in Taksim, Istanbul on 13 November was planned and executed by Turkey’s ruling AKP-MHP regime to provide a pretext for these deadly bombing raids. Without any investigation, the Turkish regime blamed the People’s Protection Units (YPG), Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for this attack. Despite the immediate and vehement rejection of this baseless accusation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, the umbrella organization which includes the YPG and YPJ) and the PKK, Turkey’s Interior Minister SüleymanSoylu, who has long track record of hostility against the Kurdish people, continues to preach this falsehood on behalf of the Turkish state.
Yet again, the Turkish state is launching an unprovoked campaign of aggression against the Kurds to distract from Turkey’s various troubles after two decades of unchecked rule by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP. Since April 17, the Erdogan regime has repeatedly attacked positions of Kurdish guerrilla fighters in South Kurdistan, using banned chemical weapons more than 2,700 times. Nonetheless, the Turkish state has achieved nothing with these attacks, and Turkish forces have burned the bodies of their own soldiers to obscure the magnitude of their losses. With the recent false flag attack in Taksim, Erdogan and the AKP-MHP hope to further distract from their defeat in South Kurdistan and provide a justification for their intensified war against the Kurds in Rojava/North and East Syria.
Erdogan’s crumbling regime can only stay in power by defeating the historic resistance of the Kurdish people to his neo-Ottoman occupation of Kurdistan. With the attack in Taksim, Erdogan hoped to present Turkey as a victim of terrorism perpetrated by the Kurds to obtain a green light for an attack on Rojava at the G20 summit in Bali, and he seems to have succeeded in doing so, as the Turkish regime is unable to undertake these attacks without the approval of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, especially the United States.
If the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS is against this illegal war, then its members must immediately take strong steps through economic, political, diplomatic, and legal measures to force Turkey to comply with international law. If not, they will also bear responsibility for the consequences of Turkish state terrorism against the Kurdish people and the other peoples of North and East Syria.
We therefore call on the United Nations, the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, the European Union and the United States to force their partner to comply with its legal obligations.
The Executive Council of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK)
November 20, 2022