As al-Qaeda-linked fighters push for control over northern Syria, they have singled out a new and vulnerable target: the country’s small Turkmen minority. Over the past two months, the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has been menacing a cluster of Turkmen villages wedged between the Turkish province of Hatay and the Mediterranean Sea. The Turkmen call the area "Bayir," which means "cliff" in their native Turkish. On a recent night, I stood with a group of Turkmen fighters on the Turkish side of the border and watched a Syrian army tank positioned on a nearby mountain shell the villages at a slow but steady pace.
"We used to live in peace in our orchards, now we are being attacked from all sides," said Omar Abdullah from the Omar al-Mokhtar brigade. "The regime bombs us with MiGs [Russian-made fighter jets] from the air, with tanks from the land and with ships from the sea, and now we are being attacked by ISIS," he said.
Yet, in a pattern that appears to be repeating itself across the country, relations between ISIS and the Turkmen who are fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were initially cordial. When the ISIS militants first rolled in with their flashy weapons and SUVs they were on their best behavior. But soon they began replacing local schoolteachers and imams and preaching their rigid, unsmiling brand of Islam. "They called us 'Sufis' and 'apostates,'" Abdullah said.
Tensions flared when the militants began demanding that locals give up their daughters in "marriage" and that the Turkmen and fellow FSA fighters from Arab units cede control over the villages and raise the ISIS flag. These came to a head last month when a group of about 50 masked ISIS fighters raided a hospital in the village of Gevere, killing at least four people, including a Turkmen village elder who had come to parley with them. "First they shot them, then they cut off their ears and noses," said Yusuf Baldir, a Turkmen fighter with the Zaher Bibers brigade.
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