Peer2Politics

I recently had the opportunity to visit Turkey and North Kurdistan. In that short time, Istanbul celebrated the third year anniversary of Gezi Park, the Democratic Union Party (HDP) won unprecedented political representation in the Turkish parliament, and the cantons of Cizire and Kobane were joined. Throughout these dramatic events, I was often sitting cross-legged on living room floors, drinking tea and listening to the stories of journalists, activists, and families who had participated in the Rojava Revolution. Such conversations were made possible through many comrades, most of all through Jihad Hemmi, who acted as a guide, translator, and intellectual companion. Through my travels, I was given a glimpse of the relation between the Kurdish freedom movement and the philosophy of social ecology. By the same token, I gained a much clearer sense of the extraordinary scope and meaning of this particular revolutionary struggle.

After approximately four and a half months of fighting, Kurdish forces have successfully pushed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as ISIS or ISIL) out of Kobanî. The coalition of ground forces most notably included the People’s Defense Units (YPG) , Women’s Defense Units (YPJ) , and the Peshmerga from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).At the same time, through the air, a U.S. led-coalition made 700 airstrikes against ISIS. On February 6 it was reported  “fourteen more villages and some strategically important points have been liberated.” In an October 2014 article for Naked Capitalism Claude Salhani noted the strategic importance of the region. Salhani stated “victory for” ISIS in the region “would give the group prestige among the dozens of groups lined up in the fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad. It would also secure the terror organization’s flow of oil to a lucrative market.”

"We, the people of the Democratic Autonomous Regions of Afrin, Jazira and Kobane, a confederation of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens, freely and solemnly declare and establish this Charter, which has been drafted according to the principles of Democratic Autonomy.

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, activist, anarchist David Graeber had written an article for the Guardian in October, in the first weeks of the ISIS attacks to Kobane (North Syria), and asked why the world was ignoring the revolutionary Syrian Kurds.

"Abdullah Ocalan was the most wanted man in Turkey for almost two decades until his kidnapping and arrest in 1999. He has been in prison ever since. He is the founder of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). From 1984, under his leadership, the PKK fought for an independent Kurdish state in the south east of Turkey. In a sustained popular uprising, tens of thousands of PKK guerrillas took on the second largest army in NATO.

"Rojava is the home of a "revolutionary model" that no less than challenges "the hegemony of the capitalist, nation-state system" - way beyond its regional "meaning for Kurds, or for Syrians or Kurdistan."

"This region – which consists of three geographically disconnected enclaves along the Turkish border – strategically used the deteriorating situation to declare self-rule in July 2012 and has since been celebrated as the “Rojava Revolution” within the Kurdish Movement associated around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The population of Rojava, which has long been a stronghold of the PKK, is predominantly made up of Kurds – both Muslim and Yezidi[1] – as well as Arabs, Christian Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmen and Chechens. The desire for some form of self-determination especially among the Kurds was triggered through decades of denial of basic citizenship rights under the Assad-regime.