At the top of those conditions was the extradition of people linked to the PKK or the movement of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Turkey’s authorities consider responsible for a coup attempt in 2016.Īs Swedish authorities began to comply with these requests, listed in a trilateral memorandum signed in June 2022 with Finland and Turkey, its Kurdish residents seemed to pay the highest price.Īn initial request to return 33 terrorists, in Turkey’s wording, quickly escalated to reach about 130 people in January 2023, after left-wing protesters hanged an effigy of Erdogan from a bridge in central Stockholm. The decision, formalized in May 2022, put a definitive end to the country’s two-century tradition of neutrality.Ī longtime NATO member, Turkey posed a series of conditions for ratifying the request, which must be approved by all the parties of the military alliance. While signs of increased collaboration between Sweden and Turkey to counter terrorism date back a few years, the trigger event was the Swedish government’s application to join NATO, driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine. “We were sung as heroes, and now we risk becoming undocumented,” said Turan, who attempted twice to take his own life out of fear of being deported to Turkey. Swedish authorities were among the most vocal supporters of the YPG fight against jihadi groups.Ī few years later, this enthusiasm and its corollary of political and military support for Kurdish movements gave way to a thinly veiled disavowal as Sweden sought NATO membership, only to be blocked by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who continues to seek concessions from Stockholm-imperiling the lives of political activists and asylum-seekers such as Turan. I carried injured children on my back.” At the time, many in the Western world saw these Kurdish fighters and volunteers as heroes sacrificing their lives to defeat the Islamic State. “I spent days assisting desperate, screaming people, both civilians and fighters, hit by mortar shells or bomb shrapnels,” he recalled. He finally ended up volunteering as a paramedic along the front line of the battle between the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian-Kurdish militia with ties to the PKK, and armed jihadi factions-a house-to-house confrontation that gained global attention during the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani, repelled by the Kurdish guerrillas at the end of 2014. Instead, for years, he kept moving across the borders of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria to escape repression in Turkey, where he was tortured and beaten as a teenager “for singing a Kurdish song,” he said. Turan said he sympathized with the movement’s quest for Kurdish rights but never took part in any armed actions. 13.Īt the center of the dispute was Turan’s alleged proximity to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which both Turkey and Sweden consider a terrorist organization. Turan shows his scars at his home in Sandviken, Sweden, on Feb. Despite this, the Swedish Migration Agency, the government body tasked with assessing asylum and residency claims, was unmovable.Ĭelil Turan is shirtless looking into the camera as he shows his scars on his shoulder and back at his home in Sandviken, Sweden. His lawyer appealed the decision, citing both his physical condition-one of his legs had to be amputated after he stepped on a land mine in 1993-and the concrete risks that he could be detained and tortured if sent back to his native Turkey. Turan’s asylum application was rejected for the first time in 2019. In the span of a few years, though, their hopes were smashed to pieces. Known for housing one of Sweden’s biggest steel factories and for having hosted a handful of Jimi Hendrix concerts in the late ’60s, Sandviken became a home to Turan in 2015, when he and his wife, Cheikha, decided to flee war to find shelter in Scandinavia.įor the couple, who had met and married in Syria’s north, a region that Kurdish nationalist movements call Rojava-“The West” in the Kurmanji dialect-this quiet Swedish town embodied the opposite of all they had left behind: trauma, persecution, and very little freedom to express their ideas. “It’s my only escape, an effort to reestablish some psychological balance,” he said right after leaving the complex. As he does every Sunday, he plunged into an Olympic-size pool and spent hours doing laps, with rare breaks. It was a freezing morning in February when Celil Turan walked into a majestic sports arena on the outskirts of Sandviken, a town in the Swedish county of Gavleborg.
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