It appears every time that Turkey has a high level meeting with US officials or a call with a US official Turkish state media is mobilized to invent or discover some new “YPG/PKK terror.”
Turkey’s state media claimed last week that a “mass grave” of 61 bodies was found in Afrin in Syria, an area that Turkey illegally occupies and which it ethnically cleansed of Kurds in 2018. The Turkish state media claims, without any evidence that “the victims were executed by the US-backed PKK/YPG terrorist organization.”In fact, say many Kurds, the victims were people killed by Turkey who had been buried in rows of marked graves until Turkey bulldozed the grave markers in 2018.
Now Ankara has discovered a grave it allegedly desecrated and is inventing false reports. The claims by Turkey and its state media, that often behaves as a propaganda arm of Turkey’s ruling AKP party, is not the first time Ankara has invented stories about Afrin. On the eve of a meeting with US President Joe Biden and Turkey’s President, Turkey invented a story of a “YPG/PKK terror attack on hospital” in Afrin in mid-June. Turkish media, such as Anadolu, pushed the story until after the June 14 meeting, and then it suddenly stopped covering it, as if the attack had never happened. It is still not clear who bombed the hospital.According to photos and video put out by Kurdish activists the graves in Afrin were once marked in 2018 and included those who had recently been killed by Ankara’s invasion of Afrin in 2018. Afrin was a peaceful Kurdish area in Syria during much of Syria’s civil war. Turkey unleashed far-right extremist groups made up of Syrians who Turkey had recruited, to attack the area in January 2018.The goal was to depopulate Afrin and then bring in pro-Turkey Syrian Arabs who had been displaced from other areas of Syria. Turkey wanted to use Syrian rebel groups to fight Kurds so that Turkey could work with Iran and Russia in Syria against the US.