"We'd be killing our land with our own hands if we used the polluted water," says Farmer Nizar al-Awad who has stopped irrigating his land in northeast Syria from a local river now sticky with oil, with an official in the Kurdish-held area saying Turkish strikes sparked the slicks. "All the farmers in the area have stopped using the river for irrigation," said Awad, 30, from a village near Tal Brak, in Hasakeh province. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES