Lelun Afrin
On 13th March 2024, a displaced person in Jenderes city in Afrin region killed the 16-year-old Kurdish child, “Ahmed Khaled Mamo” from “Al-Hammam” village in the Jenderes district, in a heinous manner. The perpetrator, called “Yamen Ahmed Al-Ibrahim” is 18 years old, comes from the Sinjar district of the Idlib countryside. Ahmed was beheaded and stabbed several times, then thrown into a deep well in an area outside the city on the road between Jenderes and “Tal Salour” village owned by the citizen “Haj Ibrahim.”
A private source spoke to “Lelun” about the circumstances of the incident, saying: “Ahmed was in the market buying breakfast items for the family and he was seen by the perpetrator, Yamen, who lured him under the pretext of selling him motorcycle parts, which were located on a farm outside Tal Salour Road. When they arrived at the farm, Yamen stabbed him with a knife and slaughtered him, then wrapped a rope around him and strangled him, then lowered him into the well. This incident took three hours.”
A problem had occurred between the perpetrator and the bakery owner a week before the incident and victim’s father expelled him as a result. The victim’s father, Khaled Mada, confirmed in an interview with Rudaw Media Network that “The killer of his son comes from Hama Governorate. He is over 20 years old, and that he carried out the crime alone, according to preliminary information.”
The people, accompanied by the so-called Civil Defense teams, rushed to remove the body from the well after the perpetrator confessed to the location of the body. It was transferred to the military hospital in Afrin, amid a state of anger by the citizens gathered in front of the hospital.
This incident sparked a wide wave of protests and demonstrations by forcibly displaced people of Afrin, civil society activists, and human rights activists, through which they expressed their indignation and denunciation of the crime in both Jenderes and Afrin. Protests also spread to the areas of Shahba, Aleppo, Qamishli, and many European cities. Also a number of Rights and political organizations denounced by issuing statements regarding this crime.
This crime is added to the record of violations by armed factions and displaced people against the indigenous people of Afrin, and within the series of attacks that never end since the region came under occupation on 18th March 2018, as a result of the absence of law and the spread of indiscriminate weapons.
Not two days had passed since the murder of the minor, “Ahmed Khaled Mamo Mada,” until, on 15th March 2024, a masked group assaulted and beat the Kurdish minor child, Roudy Muhammad Jaqal, 16 years old, from the people of the Jenderes district and a resident of the Afrin – New Afrin neighborhood, near Avrin Hospital and threatened to kill him. He was transferred to the hospital to receive the necessary treatment, but the motives for the crime are not yet known.
According to a source for “Lelun” close to the victim, after the assailants insulted him, they threatened to kill him, saying, “Say goodbye to your family” and stabbed him several times with a knife.
The incident comes days after the stabbing of the Kurdish student, “Shiyar Ibrahim Omar”, 17 years old, from Qantara village in the Maabatli district. He is a student in the eleventh grade, on 25th February 2024, in the town of Maabatli, by five displaced students at the Maabatli Secondary School. They come from the town of Hayyan in the northern countryside of Aleppo. They beat him several times with a knife (bayonet) and he was transferred to the hospital in Afrin city to receive treatment.
On 25th July 2023, the fifteen-year-old minor Nazmi Ashraf Othman in Jenderes was beaten and threatened by a masked armed group suspected of belonging to the Jaish al-Sharqiya faction, knowing that he was from a Peshmerga family in which four Kurdish young men were killed on the night of Nowruz 2023, by an armed group from the Jaish al-Sharqiya faction of the Syrian National Army, according to what Lelun reported earlier.
Cases of systematic killing of civilians, including women and children, especially indigenous Kurds, are widespread by militants from factions of the so-called “Syrian National Army” and displaced people in the Afrin region, in light of the widespread proliferation of weapons and the security chaos, to prevent the forcible return of displaced people to their villages and cities and force residents to displacement and leaving their homes and possessions.
Many international human rights reports have indicated that indigenous people have been deliberately targeted since 2018 until now, the most recent of which was a Human Rights Watch report that documented human rights violations in Afrin.