Qamishlo — Since January 6, the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods have been subjected to severe attacks and grave violations targeting unarmed civilians, reflecting the continuation of violence and exclusion policies, and attempts to crush popular will through military force, suffocating siege, and psychological and media warfare.

On Tuesday, January 13, the Women’s Council of the Democratic Union Party issued a public statement highlighting the massacres and serious violations committed against residents of the two neighborhoods. The statement held the responsible parties fully accountable for the crimes committed and called on the international community and human rights organizations to take urgent action to halt these violations, launch independent international investigations, and ensure accountability.

The statement read:
“Our people in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods have been subjected to horrific massacres and grave violations, carried out in a systematic manner aimed at breaking the will of the people and subjugating them through the imposition of a suffocating siege, indiscriminate shelling, and direct attacks targeting civilians and residential areas, in blatant violation of all humanitarian values and international conventions.”

It added that the bloody events witnessed in the area—resulting in civilian martyrs and wounded, particularly women and children, alongside abductions, detentions, enforced disappearances, and the forced displacement of indigenous residents—clearly reveal a brutal, repressive, and inhumane approach based on targeting unarmed civilians and committing systematic war crimes against the people and their fighters, especially women fighters. These acts, the statement said, represent a desperate attempt to undermine the symbolic struggle of free women and to break the will and resilience of resistance.

The Women’s Council stressed that these practices constitute organized policies of genocide and persecution, relying on killing, abduction, detention, and forced displacement as systematic tools against the Kurdish people. It held the interim government fully responsible for these crimes, citing clear Turkish incitement and support, alongside a disturbing international silence that amounts to complicity in these grave violations.

The statement further noted that the aggression was not limited to field crimes and bloody massacres, but was accompanied by a systematic psychological war targeting public awareness through organized incitement and media disinformation campaigns. These efforts sought to sow internal division, turn the people against their military forces and national leadership, undermine mutual trust between society and its defenders, destabilize social cohesion, and facilitate projects of domination and internal chaos.

According to the statement, the attack on Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh did not resolve any political crisis nor impose what is referred to as “state authority,” but instead exposed the logic of violence and revealed a state of political and moral bankruptcy based on repression, massacres, the detention of civilians, and systematic incitement against the free will of the people.

The Women’s Council of the PYD called on human rights organizations, international bodies, and the United Nations to take immediate and urgent action, open independent international investigations into the massacres and violations committed, hold those responsible accountable, and ensure the immediate and unconditional release of all abductees and detainees.

The Council also praised the heroic resistance demonstrated by the people in confronting this aggression—embodied by fighters and women fighters alongside the legendary steadfastness of local residents—affirming that this resistance has proven an enduring truth: the will of the people cannot be defeated, and policies of killing, displacement, genocide, abduction, and incitement have failed—and will continue to fail—to break the will for freedom and dignity.