Kurdish-Jewish Covenant of Friendship Azadi Shalom

By Dr. Jan Best de Vries:

Yazidi refugee (pic – ANF)

Winter has arrived in Kurdistan and many babies born in the cold tents of the fugitives from the killers  of the “Islamic State” will die. My bodyguard Azad Kardoi and I visited in Erbil a camp of 62 tents within a church compound and are sure that the inhabitants will be cared for by Father Douglas and the private Christian Kurds in the neighborhood who helped these poor citizens from Karakosh who’ve lost everything they ever had. But the hundreds of tents on the open plateau near the border of Hawler are exposed to the merciless wind and, in these, many babies will die.

Back in the Netherlands we read that some 400 Yezidi girls and women had escaped from their Islamist rapists and, mostly pregnant, had succeeded in reaching this camp. From the Dutch town Zwolle trucks will bring blankets, winter cloths and medicaments, but never enough for all. The best thing these traumatized female Yezidi Kurds can do for their few surviving babies is to give to them a Zoroastrian upbringing with the moral values of old and let them, once grown up, become Peshmergas in the service of a free Kurdistan: may they and their children never lose hope!

However, from a military point of view, the most vulnerable area inhabited by Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Jews and other minority groups is not Hawler, but Rojava. This is the reasonwhy, from The Hague, we’ve financed Kalashnikovs for the Women’s Defense Units (YPJ), just to feel ourselves, as a Dutch NGO committee, a bit less powerless in their struggle for freedom in the Arab state of Syria.

From an historical point of view, in Europe Jews have always been persecuted by Catholics (just because they were Jews); systematically, the last time by the Catholics around Hitler, but nowadays preferently by Muslims (again just because they are Jews….). It occurred to us that also Armenians, Kurds and Jews have been persecuted (at least since 1919, but earlier too) by the Islamic states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, just because they are who they are. Thus the backbone of a free and peaceful West Asia in the future can only be the friendship between millions of persecuted Kurds and Jews and therefore we are now financing in the Netherlands the Kurdish-Jewish Covenant of Friendship Azadi Shalom. After all, at least somewhere in this terrible world with religious freaks one has to start with the humanitarian values of freedom and peace…. But, there again, I’m just a stupid Agnost.

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)