by Steve Sweeney
International editor

KURDISH officials have demanded urgent action from the international community after a report warned that more than 7,000 people have been kidnapped from Afrin by Turkish-backed jihadists since the 2018 invasion.

They called on the world to demand an end to the Turkish occupation and bombing of Afrin, as missiles continue to terrorise the civilian population in the northern Syrian enclave of Rojava.

The Afrin Human Rights Organisation’s (AHRO) end-of-year report, released on Monday, documents “a third year of grisly human rights violations, depredations and war crimes to be added to the black record of Turkish occupation in Afrin.”

According to the AHRO, at least 7,343 civilians have been kidnapped during three years of occupation by Turkish forces, with the fate of more than half of the victims unknown.

Last month the Morning Star reported on the abduction of hundreds of Kurdish women from Afrin, who have been trafficked via Turkey to Libya and used as sex slaves by jihadist gangs.

Fears have been raised over the fate of the disappeared women, and Rojavan women’s organisations have drawn comparisons with the treatment of Yazidi women in Sinjar in 2014.

The AHRO reported that women in particular are being targeted by the occupying Turkish forces and their jihadist allies.

At least 70 murders and 68 cases of rape have been recorded, though the real numbers are likely to be much higher.

A total of 604 civilians have been killed in Afrin in the past three years, according to the report.

Some 498 were killed due to Turkish bombing, which has intensified in a recent new offensive.

The report says that 300,000 Kurds have been forced from their homes to be replaced by some 400,000 Arab and Turkish people as part of an ethnic-cleansing operation.

The names of villages and town squares have also been changed from the original Kurdish, with posters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed from public buildings.

Turkish troops and their jihadist allies are thought to have destroyed about 315,000 trees, including olive trees, with about 11,000 hectares of agricultural land deliberately burned.

Allegations of war crimes in Afrin have been noted by the United Nations, but its response and that of the wider international community has been muted.

Occasional mild criticism is offset by sustained arms sales to Turkey. Germany lobbied against a Greek call for an EU embargo last month, insisting that it was not “strategically correct.”