22 April 2015
Dear Mr. Sarup,
Please accept our appreciation of having got an opportunity to present the cause of Reconstruction of
Kobanê. We are also very thankful to Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Møller, for facilitating our
presence.
Herein we will just summarize the issues presented yesterday. After liberation of Kobanê, we were
confronted with a totally destructed town full of land mines left behind by ISIS. Upon renewed access to
Kobanê, nearly half of the refugees who had fled their comes, counting more than 100 thousands people,
returned to the city. However, these people were met with lack of infrastructure as to water supply, electricity,
and much more causing another travel back to Turkey. Unfortunately, 46 civilians lost their lives due to land
mines mentioned above.
Now, the administration and Reconstruction Board of Kobanê have established 6 different committees to
prepare and plan the future rebuilding and demining of Kobanê. This board went on to remove land mines
using own, primitive resources which come to short regards to handling the vast number of mines. Also, this
Board is working building of a hospital, a school and major bakery. Even these processes are hindered due
to lack of supplies, which Turkey is not allowing the use of the border to and regards all activity across as
illegal.
In Europe, representatives of the Reconstruction Board are in close contact with international institutions
including EU (ECHO, Syrian Desk, Turkey Desk, Crisis Desk, Humanitarian, and Non-humanitarian Desk),
and other international NGO’s. These organizations have made decisions and promised to delivery
humanitarian aid but these have not been implemented yet while assessing way to come around this. The
best solution to bring this aid is to work through local authorities and NGO’s.
As mentioned during our meeting, we kindly ask you to make use of your opportunities to influence on your
government and EU to handle as soon as possible and work with local partners. Only this way, we can help
the 200 thousands of refugees and rebuild Kobanê. Of course, we will further inform you in the near future as
to the details of our reconstruction work.
For you information, the latest Kobanê Damage Report is available online following the link below:
http://helpkobane.com/2015/04/07/kobane-canton-damage-report-april-2015/
Yours sincerely,
Adem Uzun and Necati Harmankaya
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Reconstruct Kobanê
Rue Jourdan 48, 1060 Brussels
Tel: 00 32 - 485 103 914
Web:
http://helpkobane.com/
Email: