RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sirwan Kajjo is a Syrian-Kurdish Washington-based journalist and author.

At the onset of the Turkish offensive, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government declared it a “jihad” against Syrian Kurds. Turkish preachers gave sermons justifying the assault as a “holy war.”

Turkey and jihadist groups are now forcing non-Muslim minorities in Afrin to convert to Islam. Yazidi temples, for example, have been destroyed by militants. Yazidi residents have been forcibly taken to mosques to convert to Islam.

Kurdish groups have accused the government of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of carrying out a campaign to create a demographic change aiming at dislodging native Kurdish civilians from their lands and replacing them with Sunni Arabs from Turkish-based refugees camps.

After little more than a month since capturing the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwestern Syria, the Turkish government and its jihadist allies are discussing plans to rule the city by Islamic sharia law.

A meeting recently took place between Turkish authorities and rebel leaders of the al-Rahman Legion to decide how to build an Islamic police force, sharia courts and other religious centers.

Al-Rahman Legion is one of the largest Islamist rebel groups that was in control of the eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held area in Damascus. The group was recently expelled from the area after a Turkish- and Russian-brokered deal between the Syrian regime and groups rebelling against it, such as Al-Rahman. It has since resettled in the city of Afrin, along with hundreds of families from the Damascus suburban area.

Since 2012, Afrin had been run by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a U.S.-backed group that had a secular system of governance which rejected political Islam and promoted relatively liberal ideals.

No-go zones are growing rapidly in the suburbs of all of France’s main cities. Shanty towns built by illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East have sprung up in parts of Marseilles and Paris in the last few years. Islamization is everywhere. In hundreds of mosques, imams deliver fiery anti-Western speeches. Churches are vandalized. The number of rapes is rapidly increasing. Groups of veiled women roam the streets and insult the “immodest”, unveiled, women.

Macron’s most important project since he was elected has been the creation of new Islamic institutions destined to adapt France to Islam — not to adapt Islam to France. Many more mosques will be built, financed with taxpayer money; departments of Islamic culture will open in universities, and imam training centers created.

Macron’s main advisor on this subject is Hakim El Karoui, the author of a book (“Islam, a French Religion”) explaining that Islam is now the main religion in the country; that prejudices of non-Muslims are the source of most troubles, and that helping Muslims to have access to more important positions in French society is of the utmost urgency.

Sadly, it will also be difficult for President Macron, Prime Minister May and Chancellor Merkel to hide that they are appeasers of Islam and the weak commanders of countries they are allowing to decay.

During his recent State visit in Washington, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of the “long friendship” between France and the United States, and tried to present himself as a reliable ally. His statements, essentially empty words, should be taken with extreme caution.