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Turkey is involved in the conflicts in Libya and around Nagorno Karabakh, using men from Syria. Mercenaries are sent into battle with false promises.
By Daniel Hechler and Tina Fuchs, SWR
Reem, Sanaa and Samer play “And you’re out.” They’re happy. His father has finally returned. He was gone a long time. They don’t know where he was: he makes money, he said. When he returned home to Idlib, Syria, after three months, there was still no more money. Only the father had changed. “Everyone wanted to go home. That was our only objective, because there only death lurked,” he reports. “They called us mercenaries. And they took our cell phones.”
Jalal Al Gamrie, we changed his name and that of the other Syrians to protect them, he is one of the hundreds of Syrians exported from Turkey as fighters, to Libya, to Azerbaijan. Under false promises, like three men who ARD– Journalists say: “It was said that we were sent to Libya to protect the Turkish bases as a diplomatic mission.”
Rocket fire at border security spot
Another Syrian family man from Idlib, controlled by Turkey, said they were told they were guarding the border. “We were surprised that then they brought us straight to the front and we had to fight.” They were given uniforms – “and then the missiles fell with great precision. Day and night we died or were injured – we lost hands and legs. Many did not have military experience.”
Syrian mercenaries, they say, feel that Turkey is using them as cannon fodder. The officers in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh are Turkish, but the fighters at the front are Syrian, mostly from the Syrian region around Turkish-occupied Idlib.
Turkey is silent
Uwe Halbach from the Science and Politics Foundation explains how difficult it is to obtain reliable information, especially with the war that recently broke out in the Caucasus. Independent institutions are not on the site. In the Russian media, the number of Syrian mercenaries in the region was given as 2000, Turkey has so far been silent.
But according to the statements of the Syrian mercenaries tagesschau.de the men are heading to the streets, in the refugee camps around Idlib. Turkish intermediaries promised a monthly salary of $ 2,000, only for security tasks, not for use in combat operations. Those hired in this way would be flown through Turkey in military or civil aircraft, the machines fully occupied by Syrians and their destination Tripoli or Baku.
At the scene, they would be sent directly to the front after their cell phones had been taken away. The London-based Syrian Center for Human Rights speaks of at least 126 Syrians killed in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
The goal: to order power in the Caucasus region
Turkey, according to political scientist Halbach, aggressively targets the role of the new regulatory power in the Caucasus region, but wants to save its own army. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan doesn’t have much to lose: Syrian mercenaries’ pay is low, mass use of drones is cheaper than airplanes, explains Matthias Hartwig, international lawyer at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Law in Heidelberg. .
Especially since Turkey has not signed the international agreement on the recruitment, use, financing and training of mercenaries. The European Union is quite passive. The Syrians, sent by Turkey to the foreign war, did not participate in the deliberations at the political level.
A choice between hunger and armed service
The situation in Idlib is complicated. Many fled the Assad regime to the last rebel stronghold. An estimated three million people now live there, hundreds of thousands in refugee camps. Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad leaves no doubt that he wants to regain control of the northern region. But neighboring Turkey has sided with the rebels and occupies large areas as a self-proclaimed protective power. The population, however, lives well below the poverty line, often without access to water or electricity, without a roof over their heads.
Jalal Al Gamrie, the father of Reem, Samer and Sanaa, saw compatriots die on the battlefield in a foreign place every day, he says. He was faced with a choice: pick up a gun or no longer be able to support his family. He had no choice then, he said. But after two months of war in a foreign country, after continuous work at the front, he was finished. Although he survived. But he did not receive the full $ 2,000 promised by the Turkish intermediaries. You don’t know anyone who has received full pay.
