[FACT CHECK]

The @nytimes recently published an article about the Turkish occupation of Afrin, calling it a ‘safe zone’. The article contains several inaccuracies about the situation on the ground, outlined

The Afrin canton has seen virtually no combat during the Syrian Civil War. Religious minorities were protected under the AANES and its predecessors in this overwhelmingly Kurdish region. An estimated 316,000 internally-displaced Syrians - both Kurdish and Arab - fled to Afrin.

The invasion’s raison d'être does not hold up to scrutiny. Turkey accused the PYD/YPG forces in Afrin of launching “more than 700 attacks” against Turkish cities. However, upon further investigation, only 15 confirmed incidents of cross-border attacks from Afrin emerged.

Over half of Afrin’s majority-Kurdish population were forcefully displaced by Turkey’s invasion and prevented from returning. Around 400,000 Syrian Arabs were settled in the region. Currently, Arabs and Turkmen make up around 75% of the population…

...Together with Turkey’s erasure of the Kurdish language and culture in occupied Afrin, this amounts to a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing and a prosecutable crime against humanity.