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YPG members on guard near border gate at Tel Abyad
By Dr Jan Best de Vries:
Now that the Turkish genocide of Kurdish civilians in Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan) has been extended to the villages within Rojava, both the USA and Europe with their alleged “human rights” policies keep looking away from it. A month ago the first embassy of Rojava was opened in Moscow and this is not so strange as it may seem to western “democrats”, because the “oppressive” Russians are the only ones who plead for the presence of a delegation from Rojava at Geneva during the peace talks on the future of Syria.
However, in the first instance it is not to the Russians that the people of Rojava in their woes should look for help. In my favorite coffeeshop ‘Mi casa es su casa’ (Baarn, The Netherlands) my Jewish friend Theo – whose family has been strongly reduced by genocide during World War II – recently remarked: “The Kurds are the new Jews of West Asia.” And right he was, for the only country in the region in which Kurds are not persecuted for just being Kurds is Israel. During the years 200,000 Kurdish Jews, or if they prefer to call themselves Jewish Kurds, have fled from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria to Israel, the only safe haven they could find when they didn’t want to leave West Asia and become exiles too far away from their homelands. Half of them live in the area of greater Jerusalem nowadays. I wish that the other half mostly may live as colonists in the north of Israel to defend its borders as peshmergas against attacks by Hezbollah and the Arab Syrian Army. So in the region it is only for Israel to boast about containing a Little Kurdistan within its borders and for that very reason the second embassy of Rojava should be opened in Jerusalem.
When in the future the land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, stolen by Turkey in 1923, will be restored to Rojava, then may Rojava export its oil and agricultural products to Israel and Israel its technical know-how and weapons to Rojava. But till that day will dawn we mourn, we mourn, we mourn over our dead….
Dr. Jan Best de Vries is an archaeologist and historian, decipherer of the so-called Byblos Script from Aleppo and Alalakh (‘How to Decipher the Byblos Script’, Aspekt Publishers 2014, ISBN978-946-153-420-0)
