By Dr. Jan Best de Vries: At the end of the year 2015 it is useful to reflect upon the new society which the Kurds and minority groups like the Assyrians, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Tschetchens and Aramaeans together have created in Rojava, the overwhelmingly Kurdish region in North Syria stretching along the border with terrorist Turkey…
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Category Archives: Syria
Yazidi Translators’ Treacherous Escape from Shingal to Germany
By Dr. Amy L. Beam: Nayf’s Journey At daybreak, December 8, one of my Yazidi translators, Nayf, landed safely in the Greek Island of Chios in a rubber boat with his fiancée and her family of six. This was their second attempt after failing to make it to Kos Island from Bodrum last week. They…
Turkey: The Fuse for World War III
By Dr Jan Best de Vries: There are a lot of players on the battle fields of Syria: the Assad regime with its allies Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, the FSA, Rojava, the Gulf States and a Western coalition under the guidance of the USA. What they all want to disappear are their enemies of the…
Great Spirits and Mediocre Minds
By Evin Cheikosman: Following Turkish President Erdoğan’s defeat in the June 6th parliamentary elections, on June 16th the Kurdish YPG/ YPJ took over the Syrian city of Tel Abyad, initially controlled by ISIS. Fortunately, this capture prevents ISIS from having a direct route for importing recruits and supplies, and puts more pressure on its de facto…
Kurdistan’s Independence: From 4 to 1-State Solution – The Case for a United States of Kurdistan, USK
By Dr. M. Koohzad: PART 1 of 2 Introduction: The Kurdish political leadership in Erbil, the capital city of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, KRG, in Northern Iraq, was about to carry out a referendum to declare independence when Daesh, meaning Donkeys in Arabic, Jihadist terrorists – the so-called ISIS, showed up at their doorsteps….
Eyewitness: The Liberation of Tel Abyad
By John Hunt: Introduction Last week’s ISIS raid on Kobane, with the murder of more than 240 civilians, was a fiendish reprisal for the humiliating defeat the jihadists had suffered the previous week when they were driven from Tel Abyad by the YPG, supported by US air strikes. The Kobane raid began, probably from inside…
Open Letter to President Obama on Turkish Complicity in ISIS’s Second Assault on Kobani
By Dr. Amir Sharifi: The following letter was sent to President Barack Obama; another version of it to to Vice President Joseph Biden: Dear Mr. President: We write to urge you to denounce the Turkish complicity in the recent attack launched by the Islamic State on the town of Kobani. Islamic State in its twin attack…
US Volunteer ‘Died Fighting For Humanity’ Says Kobani PM, As YPG ‘Enters’ Girê Spî
By John Hunt: Hundreds of Kurds gathered in the ravaged centre of Kobani last Thursday to honour US citizen Keith Broomfield who died on 3rd June while fighting in the ongoing war between the YPG forces of Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and Daesh (ISIS). Women, men and children stood around his coffin or above it on…
Rojava, Back to the Future
By Dr. Jan Best de Vries: Around 3200 BPE, the agricultural, matriarchal cultures in West Asia and Europe were overthrown by nomadic, patriarchal tribes from the Russian and Siberian steppes. The members of peaceful communities were slaughtered and raped in the same way as the beasts of IS operate with their victims these days in…
Democratic Union Party’s Response to UK Government Report 2015
By Saleh Muslim: In March 2015, the UK Government published a report in response to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (titled: UK Government Policy on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq). In this report, the Government outlined its policies towards Iraqi Kurdistan and Syrian Kurds. The report (paragraph 15) unfairly criticised our party, the…
‘We trusted our people, and they are doing well’: Salih Muslim, PYD Rojava leader
KT Report: “We know our people, we trusted our people, we organised our people and the results are in front of everybody”. Salih Muslim co-chairman of the PYD (Democratic Union Party), the dominant political party in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), last night addressed hundreds at a packed meeting in the Palace of Westminster, London. Convened by the Centre for…
Tev-Dem Lays Out Proposal for a Political Solution to the Syrian Conflict
By the Peace in Kurdistan Campaign: Tev-Dem (Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk /Movement for a Democratic Society, Rojava/Northern Syria), the political coalition governing the democratic autonomous region of Rojava, northern Syria, has released a proposal for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria, which has now been raging for four years. Bookmark on Delicious Recommend on…
The Rojava Revolution
By Evangelos Aretaios: This article was first published by Open Democracy News of the fight of the Syrian Kurds has reached many homes in Europe and the US over the last year as TV channels around the world have covered the resistance of the Kurds against Daesh (self-proclaimed “Islamic State”) in Kobane. The fighting was…
Kurdish Victory in Kobani
By Dr. Rashid Karadaghi: After 134 days of heroic resistance, the brave Kurdish men and women of Kobani (Syrian-occupied Kurdistan), with the help of the Peshmerga and the US-led coalition air-strikes, won an incredible victory over the barbaric ISIS terrorists and pushed them out of the legendary city. For the past four months, Kobani has…
Fighting and Mourning for Kurdistan
By Dr Jan Best de Vries: Three years ago I wanted to travel to Aleppo and help there the wounded Kurdish, female and male freedom fighters in the northern district Sheik Maksud. Fate decided otherwise and now I’m teaching, with intervals of half a year, Kurdish history and archaeology at the Mesopotamia Academy in Qamishlo…
