Violence prompts thousands of Kurds to flee Syria
Iraqi Kurdish leader not expected to send security forces into Syria after reports children, women slaughtered
BAGHDAD— A sudden influx of 30,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria into Iraq increases the likelihood that Iraq’s Kurdish region will act to protect its kin across the border, an adviser to Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said on Monday.
The United Nations said nearly 30,000 refugees had crossed in the past few days, making it one of the biggest single outward migrations of a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and driven millions from their homes.
“It is a massive movement of people,” Dan McNorton, spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Reuters on Monday.
The UN agency has sent trucks loaded with emergency supplies and erected plastic tarpaulins at a transit site to provide shelter from the sun and heat. A refugee camp is expected to open by the end of the month, McNorton said.
Refugees who crossed a newly built metal pontoon bridge spanning the Tigris River said they were fleeing attacks by the Al Nusra Front, a radical Sunni Arab rebel group that has merged this year with Iraq’s own resurgent branch of Al Qaeda.
“There are bodies without heads at the morgue today. Why? Which international norms and which doctrine can justify their death? They are cutting off heads. Heads of children are being cut off,” said Faris Sulaiman, a refugee who fled from Qamishli in northeast Syria.
“The Al Nusra Front have permitted the killing, the slaughtering of the Kurdish people,” he added.
Barzani, leader of Iraq’s autonomous ethnic Kurdish region in the north, floated the idea this month for the first time of intervening across the Syrian border. In a letter posted on his website on Aug. 10, he said he had sent envoys to Syria to investigate reports civilians were being killed.
“If the reports are true, showing that citizens, women and the children of innocent Kurds are under threat from murder and terrorism, Iraq’s Kurdistan region will make use of all of its capabilities to defend women and children and innocent civilians,” Barzani said in the letter.
A Barzani adviser told Reuters on Monday that the sudden refugee influx increased the likelihood that he would order action, although he played down the suggestion the leader might dispatch his powerful secu- rity forces across the frontier. “Sure, Barzani’s intervention has become likely after what has happened in the last few days. But I do not expect that he will involve the military,” the adviser said. “Mr. Barzani has expressed his dissatisfaction with the massacres suffered by the Kurdish people in Syria and asked the UN, U.S. and neighbouring countries to protect the Kurdish people who are facing semi-genocide.”
Syria’s civil war has spilled across the Iraqi frontier, with Syria’s Al Nusra Front merging this year with Iraq’s branch of Al Qaeda, the same group that fought for the past decade against U.S. forces and Iraq’s Shiiteled government. On the Iraqi side of the border, Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for repeated bombings targeting civilians and the security forces that have brought violence to levels unseen in more than five years, before U.S. troops withdrew in 2011. In Syria, the opposition to President Bashar Assad has splintered on sectarian and ethnic lines after two years of war, with rival rebel groups turning on each other in a scramble for control of territory in the divided country.
In Syria’s Kurdish-populated northeast, which Kurds in neighbouring countries refer to as “western Kurdistan,” Kurds have flown their own flag over towns and villages in an apparent bid to create an autonomous region modelled on the one in Iraq.
Kurds have no state of their own, but predominate in parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran as well as Iraq. Iraq’s Kurds are the only ones with selfrule, having maintained autonomy since 1991.