{"id":353006,"date":"2018-03-20T07:37:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T06:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-fall-of-afrin-and-the-next-phase-of-the-syrian-war\/"},"modified":"2018-03-20T07:37:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T06:37:57","slug":"the-fall-of-afrin-and-the-next-phase-of-the-syrian-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-fall-of-afrin-and-the-next-phase-of-the-syrian-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of Afrin and the Next Phase of the Syrian War"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_100599\" style=\"max-width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-100599\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/03\/Screen-Shot-2018-03-18-at-7.59.46-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"338\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Bertramz | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The fall of Afrin city to the Turkish army and Syrian rebel forces was inevitable, but the situation remains full of dangers. A central question now is whether or not the takeover of this Kurdish enclave will lead to the ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish majority there.<\/p>\n<p>The first act of the fighters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters, an overwhelmingly Arab force, was to bulldoze the statue of a Kurdish mythological hero in the centre of Afrin. Videos taken by FSA fighters suggest that many are former Isis or al-Qaeda fighters who see the Kurds and non-Muslim minorities as enemies to be expelled or eradicated.<\/p>\n<p>Some 200,000 Kurds have fled from Afrin over the past few days, many suspecting that they will never be permitted to return. If they are right, they will join the six million Syrians displaced since 2011 and a similar number who have become refugees outside the country. Given that the Syrian population in that year was about 23 million people, more than half have lost their homes in seven years of violence.<\/p>\n<p>Afrin was easy pickings for Turkey: it is on the Turkish border and cut off from the main body of Kurdish-held territory east of the Euphrates. The only supply route south to Aleppo was controlled by the Syrian army, which would allow civilians to pass but not arms and ammunition. YPG commanders said that they had 10,000 men in the enclave, but there was never much sign of their presence. The FSA says it was able to enter the city&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/03\/19\/the-fall-of-afrin-and-the-next-phase-of-the-syrian-war\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Bertramz | CC BY 2.0 The fall of Afrin city to the Turkish army and Syrian rebel forces was inevitable, but the situation remains full of dangers. A central question now is whether or not the takeover of this Kurdish enclave will lead to the ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish majority there. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-353006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}