Turkey’s political games on graves - opinion

The sources – who wish to stay anonymous – detailed that during the exhumation of the dead bodies in the villages Gharian, Tarhuna and Nasma in the west of Libya, under the command of general Ilkay Altındag Turkish military contingent in Libya is actively collecting data and physical evidence for the future accusation against Khalifa Haftar and his associates of war crimes and nonjudicial executions. The sources state that Turkey intends to weaken the position of their opponents, including the Libyan strongman and his allied political figures. Furthermore, Turkey seeks to assure the majority voting in support of Turkish-backed candidates in the upcoming election, set on December 24, 2021. Such interference of the Turkish Republic may exert negative influence on organization of the voting process and disrupt the peaceful settlement of the Libyan crisis, the sources assume.

Last year with the aid of Ankara Government of National Accord (GNA) started an excavation of a burial site in the Libyan city of Tarhuna and discovered dozens of bodies of local residents. Immediately after the gruesome discovery, Tripoli authorities accused its adversary – commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA) Khalifa Haftar – of conducting nonjudicial executions and torture of the civilians in the territories under the LNA control.

What both the GNA officials and the loyal media chose to ignore was that the city of Tarhuna – for years – had been controlled by a local militia named al-Kaniyat that had been taking orders from none other than the GNA. It was only in April 2019 when al-Kaniyat joined the LNA offensive on Tripoli. According to Tarhuna residents, the al-Kaniyat fighters were involved in criminal activities long before 2019, but the authorities in Tripoli did not take any measures against the group, fearing that it could damage relations with an influential militia and result in its rapprochement with a rival party. Therefore, when al-Kaniyat sided with Haftar’s army, the GNA seized the opportunity and declared the LNA responsible for the ‘unearthed crimes.’ Turkey, in turn, played a key role in the information campaign in support of the Tripoli authorities by employing its powerful propaganda machine.

Libya is not the only place where Turkey is trying to exploit this matter to achieve their geopolitical ambitions and justify their military aggression.

Mid-July the Turkish Ministry of National Defense announced the discovery of a mass grave in the Syrian city of Afrin that contained 35 bodies. Turkish officials were quick to blame the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), having accused them of executing civilians and other war crimes.

The accusation was later refuted by the SDF commander Mazloum Abdi who pointed out that the site excavated by Turkish-backed armed groups was, in fact, a former Kurdish cemetery where the residents of Afrin killed by the Turkish forces and their proxies in 2018 had been buried. He also called on the international community to investigate this incident in order to stop the crimes against humanity committed by pro-Turkish militants in Syria.

Mazloum Abdi’s claims were corroborated by digital investigator Benjamin Strick who published multiple satellite images of the site from back in 2018. The photos provide undeniable evidence that a cemetery had been located on the site where the Turkish forces conducted excavations.

Strick’s discovery was followed by a wave of posts and photographs of tombstones with pictures of buried Kurdish fighters in the cemetery.

The statement made by the Turkish Defense Ministry comes directly from the playbook of the Turkish leadership that is accustomed to coming forward with such provocative claims when the time is right and that perfect moment conveniently arrives just before Turks and Americans are about to meet. Ankara’s habit of accusing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party of committing terrorist acts and war crimes against civilians before every meeting or telephone call with Washington is widely known to anyone who follows the situation.

Ankara’s consistent failure to resolve the Kurdish issue according to the Turkish vision results in a vicious cycle where Turkey descends deeper and deeper on the perilous path of the anti-Kurdish propaganda, depriving itself of the opportunity to come up with reasonable suggestions. It is not surprising that in the case of Afrin mass graves many analysts doubted that Turkey was up to the task of conducting a transparent and impartial investigation or allowing foreign experts to do so by giving them access to the scene of the alleged crime.

To demonize the Kurds and its Libyan antagonists, Ankara generates a ceaseless stream of fake news. The international community has largely learned to take such statements of Turkish officials with a grain of salt. Meanwhile, the current Turkish leadership remains undeterred and continues to launch large-scale information attacks. This brings the question: What does the Erdogan administration want to achieve?

The implementation of the pan-Turkic project in the region obviously demands enormous resources that Ankara does not possess at the moment and has never possessed even before the domestic economy crisis. However, the Turkish government under Recep Erdogan is increasingly reliant on misinformation and propaganda and not on reality, unwilling to abandon its imperialist ambitions to extend Turkey’s influence over its neighbors and beyond.