Syrian security forces open fire on peaceful Kurdish demonstrators

On Friday, 2nd November the young Kurd, Isa Khalil, 21, was killed and the two Kurds, Shiyar Khalil and Bilal Said Saleh, severely wounded. About 5000 Kurds had demonstrated in the towns of Kamishli and Ayn Al-Arab, mainly inhabited by Kurds, in the north of Syria, against the threatened invasion into the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan.

"The Syrian security forces used truncheons and tear-gas against the demonstrators right from the start”, was the description of the situation by the near-east correspondent of the GfbV, Kamal Sido. "It was only then that a few stones were thrown at the security forces, who answered with rifle-shots against the Kurdish civilians. Then they arrested 30 Kurds. This information was given us by a telephone-call from the well-known Kurdish human rights worker, Mashal Tamo from Kamishli.”

In this connection the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) calls for the release of the Kurds arrested on Friday in a letter to the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. "But also all the other Kurdish political prisoners, about 200 men and women, some of whom have been held in Syrian prisons for many years without a court sentence, must at last be set free”, demanded Sido.

The approximately two million Syrian Kurds who form the majority of the population in the three regions on the Syrian-Turkish border are up to the present day being discriminated against or oppressed in many ways. As a result of the massive policy of Arabicization 200,000 of them had their Syrian citizenship taken away in 1962, although international human rights organisations, among them the GfbV, have for 40 years called for their repatriation. The Syrian Kurds are today deprived of their rights as a minority to language and culture. Apart from this, the Kurdish villages and towns are not allowed to have their own self-administration, which in the western countries is the most natural thing in the world...