by Bailey Burnett | Oct 29, 2019 | News Slider, Student Spotlight
The Turkish invasion of northern Syria has at least one Lipscomb student wondering if she’ll ever be able to visit her Kurdish relatives in the region. Rojeda Merani and her two siblings grew up in Bellevue, the children of Kurdish refugees who had fled the Kurdistan region of Syria. “My whole life it was always, God Bless America,” she said. “America allowed my dad to come over and find a job in Miami,” which opened the door for the opportunities the family now has. She said she is unsure what she feels after President Trump made a deal a couple of weeks ago with Turkey’s president that called for American forces to be withdrawn from a strip of northern Syria, allowing the Turks to launch artillery and air attacks and eventually come in on the ground, forcing the Kurdish occupants to flee. Those Kurds had been America’s allies in the defeat of ISIS, the radical and murderous Islamic State. About 11,000 ISIS troops had been captured by the Kurds and the Americans and were held in prisons in the section Turkey invaded. Many of those ISIS members were able to use the unrest to flee their prisons. Most of Merani’s cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents remained in Syria in the years since her father and some friends sought refuge in the U.S. Because of the U.S. pullout and the Turkish invasion of that part of Syria, those relatives have — like thousands of Syrian Kurds — fled to the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Kurdistan actually has borders inside Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, but that territory is not...
