Turkey has two reasons to attack the Syrian Kurds.
- Turkey fears that the Syrian Kurds may establish a Kurdish-run territory on the Turkish-Syria border. It also fears a possible incursion by the Kurds. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to push the Syrian Kurds back from the border and establish a buffer zone between them and his country. He made a similar move in northwestern Syria in Africa, in 2018.
- Erdogan wants to expand that buffer zone and use it to resettle about 2 million of the 3.6 Syrian refugees who currently reside in Turkey. He explained this plan at the United Nations General Assembly in September, 2019
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group, by December 2018, about 3,67,965 people have died in the civil war. The figure did not include 192,035 people who, it said, were missing or presumed dead.
At least 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced while another 5.7 million have fled the region, 93% of whom have sought refuge in neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
By February 2019, some 13 million people were estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance, including 5.2 million in acute need.
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