Turkish authorities have detained a brigadier general on suspicion of human trafficking across the Syrian border, Defense Ministry sources said Thursday.
The sources confirmed reports in the Turkish media this week that a brigadier general in charge of regional operations in Syria had used his official car to smuggle people through checkpoints without being noticed, earning thousands of dollars.
It was not clear whether he was ever in the car at the time.
Defense Ministry sources confirmed his detention without saying when or where it took place.
The reports said he was detained in Ankara following an order from the prosecutor in the Akçakale district of Şanlıurfa province near the Syrian border.
The sources confirmed an investigation had been opened and the officer had been forced to retire shortly afterward.
"Administrative and judicial processes are underway," the sources said, indicating they would pursue any lawbreakers within the army, regardless of rank.
Since 2016, Türkiye has carried out successive ground operations to expel the YPG from northern Syria and to enable the safe resettlement of civilians. In the same region, Türkiye helped Assad’s opposition sustain moderate ground and now controls some territories there.
Ankara considers the YPG, which dominates the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, as an offshoot of the PKK, which took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the United States and the European Union.
The YPG took advantage of the Syrian civil war and invaded several resource-rich provinces with the help of the U.S., who called the group its ally under the pretext of driving out Daesh.
The YPG terrorists in the past nine years forced many locals to migrate, bringing their militants to change the regional demographic, seizing regional oil wells – Syria’s largest – to smuggle oil and generate revenue for its activities.
The civil war in Syria has killed more than half a million people since it erupted in 2011 after the Assad regime brutally cracked down on anti-government protests.
Türkiye is hosting more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, most of whom are under temporary protection status. It also sees scores of asylum-seekers from Syria, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, entering the country through its eastern borders before trying to cross over to Europe.
In cooperation with Qatar, Türkiye is building 240,000 new homes in 13 different sites in the Aleppo province in an effort to rehouse one-third of the Syrians who had fled across the border.
Some 554,000 Syrians have so far returned from Türkiye to the region, which has been improved with new schools, hospitals, organized industrial sites and better infrastructure. More than 6 million Syrians now live in nearly 107,000 cinder-block homes erected in Afrin.
The plan is for an organized return to the border area and across Syria, which is part of talks with Damascus.
However, attempts to reconcile Syria and Türkiye have failed to achieve progress since early 2023 despite meetings in Moscow. Damascus insists Ankara withdraw its troops from northern Syria as a main condition for Syrian-Turkish dialogue.
Türkiye says its support for the Syrian opposition’s armed forces primarily aims to ensure a terror-free northern Syria immediately across the Turkish border, which suffered several cross-border attacks by the PKK in the past.