Three members of the same family killed in Turkish shelling in Afrin district

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Three members of a Kurdish family were killed on Tuesday evening when Turkish shelling struck a house in Afrin district, an acquaintance of the deceased told Rudaw. Three members of another family at the house were also injured in the attack, according to local media.

The two families were gathered in the same house when shelling occurred in the area of Sherawa, reported Hawarnews, a media outlet affiliated with the Kurdish ruling authorities of North and East Syria.

Abdulhamid Abdulhamid, an acquaintance of the deceased family from the nearby area of Shahba, told Rudaw that the three killed were Hesen Haj Izzat, 55, his wife Fatima, and their 12-year-old daughter Sirusht Hesen. 

“The house of the Kurdish individual Hesen Haj Izzat was fully destroyed, and he, his wife and daughter were killed,” Abdulhamid told Rudaw.

“Fatima was an employee of the Syrian Red Crescent,” he said, adding that the family had been displaced from the Afrin village of Mobata by Turkey’s offensive on Afrin in 2018, relocating to Sherawa.

Abdulhamid told Rudaw that the shelling occurred from 9:30–10:00 pm on Tuesday evening, targeting multiple villages in Sherawa, close to the Kurdish force-controlled Minagh airbase.

Sherawa is the only remaining area of Afrin still controlled by Kurdish forces after their withdrawal from elsewhere in the district in 2018. The killed and injured were pulled out from the rubble once shelling stopped, according to Hawarnews.

UK-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also reported the family’s death in the shelling on Wednesday.

Members of the injured family were being treated at a hospital in Afrin’s Shahba district, according to Hawarnews. Mizgin Ibou, a nurse at the hospital, told the outlet that Issmat Hamo, 40, sustained bruising to the head, and Mufida Ramzi Hassan, 48, a broken leg. Eight-year-old Jameel Hamo suffered minor injuries, Ibou said.

Shelling by Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies frequently target Kurdish forces and the areas they control. Ten civilians were killed and 21 others wounded by Turkish shelling in the Aleppo province town of Tel Rifaat in December 2019.

Afrin was the westernmost part of an autonomous region Kurds carved out in northern Syria after nearly nine years of Syrian civil war.

Turkey launched an invasion of areas under the control of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in early 2018. Turkey views the YPG as the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), designated a terrorist group by Ankara for its four-decade, often armed struggle against the Turkish state for greater political and cultural rights. 

The invasion and subsequent control of the area by Turkish forces has caused mass displacement from the once majority-Kurdish town. Afrin’s displaced Kurds now mostly reside in the northwest Syrian camps of Tel Riffat, Shahba and Sherawa.

Kidnaps for ransom, and the mass cut-down of Afrin’s famous olive trees have become the norm in the area.

Additional reporting by Hussein Omer