Syrian Arab News Agency S A N A
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Aleppo, SANA -Media reports and local sources revealed that the Turkish regime and its mercenaries from the terrorist organizations have seized the olive harvest in Afrin and its surroundings in the northern countryside of Aleppo and stole olive oil and exported it to American markets after transferring it to Turkey and to be exported by Turkish government companies.
Representatives of a Turkish agricultural authority consisting of the so-called (Turkish Agricultural Credit Cooperatives) travelled to the United States to market 90 thousand tons of olive oil as a Turkish product to appear that it was stolen from the olives of Afrin in Syria, occupied by Turkey two years ago, a report published by the Turkish newspaper Zaman said on Friday.
Local sources told the newspaper that terrorist groups, supported by the Turkish occupation forces, seized thousands of olive trees in Afrin region after expelling their original owners from the area or seizing by force of the crops that farmers have collected from their trees.
The sources clarified that in 2018, the Turkish regime opened a border crossing adjacent to Afrin region in order to transport the stolen olive oil from Syrian lands directly into Turkish territory.
In the same context, the representative of the opposition Republican People’s Party in Turkey, Onal Cevikuz, said that the terrorist organizations loyal to Erdogan regime “stole olive trees from their owners in the Afrin region,” indicating that “the oil that is exported to the West via Turkey comes as a result of successive Turkish invasions of Syrian lands.”
For his part, Hikmat Shenzhen, head of the Turkish Chamber of Commerce, admitted that “the olives that are stolen from Syrian lands enter Turkey to be sold to foreign markets only” and that the so-called “Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives” have been granted exceptional authority to import the stolen olive oil from the Syrian fields in Afrin region.
The head of the Syndicate of Olive Oil Exporters in the Aegean Region Dawood Er explained, “The decision to bring Syrian oil to Turkey was originally a political rather than an economic decision, but the product has become an important part of the olive oil sector in Turkey.”
Bushra Dabin/ Mazen Eyon
