{"id":13650,"date":"2018-05-16T17:06:32","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T17:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.norn.is\/pistlar\/?p=13650"},"modified":"2018-09-23T17:43:37","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T17:43:37","slug":"open-letter-governments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.norn.is\/pistlar\/open-letter-governments\/","title":{"rendered":"An open letter to the governments of the UK and Iceland"},"content":{"rendered":"

An open letter to the governments of the UK and Iceland from the parents of Anna Campbell and Haukur Hilmarsson. They were announced killed in military conflict in Afrin, Syria earlier this year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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We don\u2019t know the exact number of Kurds killed in Afrin since Turkish forces launched the Operation Olive Branch last January, but evidently, the toll is high. Thousands of Kurdish fighters are dead or wounded. Hundreds of civilians have been killed or wounded and thousands displaced.<\/p>\n

While a large number of devastated families have fled Afrin, many of them after being forced out of their homes to make space for other displaced and persecuted Syrians, others stay in Afrin, trying to move on in grim circumstances. One of the many things that make their life arduous is that dead bodies are still lying around, decomposing in open fields and farmlands.\u00a0This is, of course, unacceptable for sanitary reasons, especially in a place where civilians\u2019 access to water has been deliberately limited (as was the case in Afrin for many weeks in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion) and where healthcare cannot keep up with the needs of thousands of injured people. Not being able to bury the deceased makes the families\u2019 grief even more distressful and the thought of civilians, even children, encountering the decaying bodies of their loved ones is horrifying.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

According to international humanitarian law (e.g. Article 15 of the\u00a01949 Geneva Convention for the amelioration of the condition of the wounded and sick in armed forces in the field<\/em>,) parties to a conflict have the duty to\u00a0\u201csearch for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.\u201d\u00a0Apparently, Turkish authorities have not yet fulfilled this obligation.\u00a0Moreover, since international humanitarian organizations have been allowed only limited access to the area, the Red Cross has not been able to search for bodies either.<\/p>\n

The signatories of this letter are the parents of two international volunteers, Britain\u2019s Anna Campbell and Iceland\u2019s Haukur Hilmarsson, who were killed in Afrin earlier this year. Their bodies could not be retrieved and are probably still lying on the battlefield exposed to dogs and other animals. Since such a long time has passed, DNA tests will probably be needed to identify their remains. We are not the only families outside Syria waiting for the bodies of foreign fighters, killed in Afrin, to be found. We know of parents in many countries facing the same agony. The thought of your child\u2019s dead body lying on the ground is bad enough but in addition, the Turkish forces and their allies in Afrin are known to have violated international law regarding appropriate treatment of the dead.<\/p>\n

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According to customary international law, maltreatment of dead bodies is a war crime. To name but two striking examples of such crimes:\u00a0\u00a0In October 2015 a video clip was published, showing a Turkish military truck dragging the body of a Kurdish civilian through the streets<\/a>.\u00a0At first, the authorities claimed that the video was forged. Later they stated that this conduct was reasonable since a bomb might have been attached to the body. Apart from the fact that they had no reason to think that any bomb was involved, this kind of behaviour is certainly neither sensible nor acceptable, even for a body carrying a bomb.<\/p>\n