On the night of 2 to 3 February, a Turkish bombing raid in the north-east of Syria hit and destroyed the 'Kobane Water Station', a vital water station for the population, which had already been damaged during the terrible earthquake in the winter of 2023. The power station consisted of two pumping stations, one of which was involved in a rehabilitation project of Un Ponte Per.

The pumping station that was hit by the Turkish bombardment drew water from the Euphrates River and then transmitted it to the second unit, where water purification took place, and where we would soon start an intervention to rehabilitate the facility, improve its efficiency and train its staff to ensure access to drinking water for more than 60,000 displaced people living in the entire Kobane area. The functioning of the entire water plant is currently totally compromised. Finally, a new borehole was drilled to extract water in the village of Al-Adhath, in the Shahba area, Tell Rifaat district, making water more accessible to the local population.

"The attacks on Kobane, and in particular against the civil water and electricity infrastructure, are unacceptable and constitute a crime against humanity. Daily life is becoming more and more difficult and in this way they want to force us to leave our land," says Yasser, a resident of Kobane.

The city, which recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation from the Islamic State, continues to experience precarious security conditions due to continuous Turkish bombardment and threats from Turkish-backed Islamist militias, which have already attacked and taken control of the Shahba and Membij areas in recent months, resulting in thousands of newly displaced people.

The impact of the Turkish bombardment over the past few days now affects more than 100,000 people in the entire Kobane area, which is already in a very precarious condition also due to the terrible earthquake that devastated the region in February 2023, also affecting and damaging the waterworks.

At the time, the already critical conditions of the displaced population had been severely aggravated by tremors reaching a magnitude of 7.7, causing 5,900 casualties and the destruction of over 2,000 civilian buildings. Since then, the more than 43,000 displaced people have been living in precarious conditions, without the possibility of returning to their homes and in the absence of safe shelters, food, medicine and clean water. For this reason, the Kobane Water Directorate had appealed for immediate support to increase its technical capacity. In response to this appeal, our intervention was planned, which would fit into a broader framework of activities we have been carrying out for years in north-east Syria to ensure environmental justice and work on proper waste disposal.

"Two years after the terrible earthquake that wreaked havoc across northern Syria, the inhabitants of Kobane are once again being affected by continuous Turkish attacks, which are targeting civilian infrastructure without distinction," explains Roberta, our programme desk officer for environmental justice interventions in the area. "The joy at the start of the work we were going to do to rehabilitate one of the most important water pumping stations in Kobane has been dissipated by the smoke of new rubble: tomorrow it will be even more difficult and expensive to rebuild," Roberta explains.

We strongly condemn the deliberate and indiscriminate attacks by the Turkish side against the civilian population in Syria, and in particular against civilian infrastructure necessary for survival: actions contrary to international law that must be stopped immediately.