But any Kurdish drive to seize those areas would be certain to bring a response from Turkey. . . .
Syrian Kurds are certain to do what they must to create a unit that stretches from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Mediterranean Sea. That is surely desire by Cordite which is landlocked. Syrian Kurds would also be landlocked otherwise
Turkey has serious problems with Kurds internally and His ExcellencyRecep Tayyip Erdoğan is becoming a full-fledged dictator by the day. His takeover of Turkey’s Zaman (English language version, Today’s Zaman), a major, high-circulation daily newspaper in Turkey, should sink his bid to join the European Union.
Erdoğan will, in time, see the United State’ and the European Union’s support fall away and Russia is already his enemy. He will be left with only the demonic and temporary tIsraeli Regime as his friend and it will prove unreliable.
Over the long haul, Kurds will have their own nation, and the nation will not be landlocked.
These democratic, multiethnic, multicultural, religiously inclusive, egalitarian, feminist Syrian Kurds will have the World’s support and will prevail.
The Kurds organize for the long haul. Iraqi Kurdistan is now de facto its own country, and Kirkuk is de facto a part of it, in spite of Bagdad's futile objections.
Read the works of Ali Kemal Özcan, now jailed by the Turks, who is the architect of the Kurdish resistance in Turkey; and Murray Bookchin, who relived and recently died in Brooklyn, and who was a anarchist and libertarian socialist author, influential in Kurdish, and especially in Syrian Kurdish, political discourse.
You may think of Kurds as simple, backward, ignorant people, and certainly some are. Some in the United States are too. And not only in Texas.
The leaders and the valiant female figures among the Kurds are as sophisticated and politically-well-educated a any persons in Europe or Hawaii. Good on them! The Times article, well worth reading:
Syrian Kurds Hope to Establish a Federal Region in Country’s North
Photo
A member of a Kurdish militia on the eastern side of the Euphrates River in Sarrin, Syria, in October.
CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian Kurdish parties are working on a plan to declare a federal region across much of northernSyria, several of their representatives said on Wednesday. They said their aim was to formalize the semiautonomous zone they have established during five years of war and to create a model for decentralized government throughout the country.
If they move ahead with the plan, they will be dipping a toe into the roiling waters of debate over two proposals to redraw the Middle East, each with major implications for Syria and its neighbors.
One is the longstanding aspiration of Kurds across the region to a state of their own or, failing that, greater autonomy in the countries where they are concentrated: Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, all of which view such prospects with varying degrees of horror.
The other is the idea of settling the Syrian civil war by carving up the country, whether into rump states or, more likely, into some kind of federal system. The proposal for a federal system has lately been floated by former Obama administration officials and publicly considered by Secretary of State John Kerry, but rejected not only by the Syrian government but by much of the opposition as well.
What Syrian Kurdish officials described was likely to alarm many of the other Syrian combatants: a federal region on all the territory now held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group supported by the United States military against the Islamic State extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Some of the officials said the zone would even expand to territory the Kurds hope to capture in battle, not only from ISIS but also from other Arab insurgent groups — some of them, like the Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the United States.
But Syrian Kurdish officials sought to play down the move, portraying it as nothing radical and calling it an effort to keep an already tattered and divided Syria from disintegrating further.
“Federalism is going to save the unity of a whole Syria,” said Ibrahim Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D., the leftist Syrian Kurdish party that plays a leading role in the Kurdish areas of Syria
They emphasized that the entity would not be called a Kurdish region but rather a federal region of northern Syria, with equal rights for Arabs and Turkmens.
And they strongly hinted that it was not their idea, but that it was being pushed by the Americans and other powers. A former senior administration official, Philip Gordon, and others recentlyfloated a proposal to divide Syria into zones roughly corresponding to areas now held by the government, the Islamic State, Kurdish militias and other insurgents.
The Kurdish discussions about northern Syria are becoming public just as a new round of United Nations-sponsored peace talks, heavily promoted by the United States and Russia, begins in Geneva, aiming to broker a political solution to the Syrian civil war.
The Syrian Kurdish move — still under discussion by Kurdish and other parties in the area — would fall well short of declaring independence. But it is still likely to rile the Syrian government and the main Arab-led opposition group, the High Negotiation Committee. They have both declared opposition to federalism, seeing it as a step toward a permanent division of the nation.
The New York Times Magazine recently published a piece by Wes Enzinna about his experience teaching a journalism class in Rojava, an automous region of Syria (not recognized by the Assad regime, the UN, or NATO), a "secular utopia in ISIS's backyard" whose political philosophy is heavily informed by the work of Murray Bookchin.
Rojava, the center of the the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)—a Kurdish anti-statist separatist group led by leftist revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan—has been thrust into global geopolitical significance as a major site in the fight against ISIS.
Last Februrary, the PKK successfully repelled the attempted siege of Kobani, though they remain on the frontlines of fighting ISIS. As Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Rise of the Islamic State, ISIS's attempted siege of Kobani exposed the weakness of the US-led coaition against ISIS, as Turkish President Erdogan "would clearly prefer ISIS to control Kobani rather than the PYD [the Syrian branch of the PKK]."
The PKK, led by Ocalan, has been fighting for independence from Turkey since 1978, and the U.S. State Department designated the PKK a terrorist organization in 1997. But as Enzinna details, the U.S.'s views towards the PKK have shifted, at least strategically: PKK afiliates People's Protection Units (YPG) and the all-female force (YPJ) have become key American allies. While Turkey continued to bomb Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria, President Obama sent Special Operations troops to assist Rojava.
Though Ocalan has been imprisoned since 1998, he remains the intellectual leader of the revolutionaries in the PKK. From his prison cell, he read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Murray Bookchin's "The Ecology of Freedom," and then, after that, everthing Murray Bookchin has ever written. Whereas PKK members were formely "unabashed Maoists," Ocalan's readings led him to theorize libertarian municipalism, an alternative to the modern-nation state. Enzina describes the fascinating correspondence between Ocalan and the late Bookchin, and the influence Bookchin's social ecology on the PKK:
In solitary confinement, Ocalan studied Bookchin’s magnum opus, ‘‘The Ecology of Freedom,’’ at once a sweeping account of world history and a reimagining of Marx’s ‘‘Das Kapital.’’ In it, Bookchin argues that hierarchical relationships, not capitalism, are our original sin. Humankind’s destruction of the natural world, he argues, is a product of our domination of other people, and only by doing away with all hierarchies — man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor — can we solve the global ecological crisis.
In another work, ‘‘Urbanization Without Cities,’’ Bookchin proposed an alternative to the modern nation-state that he called ‘‘libertarian municipalism.’’ Bookchin believed that the lesson of both Marxist and liberal governments was that the state was an inevitably corrupting influence and antithetical to human freedom. Bookchin favored what he called the ‘‘Hellenic model’’ of democracy, the type of direct, face-to-face government once practiced in ancient Greece. He argued that only by recovering this system could humanity address injustice, and only in this way could radical movements avoid reproducing the same inequalities they had initially set out to defeat.
It was, needless to say, pretty dreamy stuff. But Ocalan saw in it a path toward a new type of revolution. Bookchin’s proposal for achieving independence through ‘‘municipal assemblies’’ suggested to Ocalan a way of finally achieving the elusive Kurdish dream. Maybe the P.K.K. didn’t have to take state power. Maybe it could obtain Kurdish rights by creating its own separate communities inside existing countries, resorting to violence only if attacked. Maybe all along, Ocalan had been mistaken to think that liberation could be achieved by creating a Kurdish-run nation-state, Marxist or otherwise.
Enthralled and seeking guidance, Ocalan had his lawyers send an email to Bookchin. Biehl was sitting at their computer one morning in April 2004, spring snow still covering the streets of Burlington outside, when it popped up in Bookchin’s inbox. Bookchin was lying nearby on a day bed, unable to sit up because of his joint pain. He and Biehl had watched Ocalan’s arrest on television, but Bookchin dismissed him as ‘‘just another third-world Leninist.’’ Now, as Biehl read the email aloud, Bookchin discovered that Ocalan considered himself Bookchin’s ‘‘student,’’ and ‘‘had acquired a good understanding of his work, and was eager to make the ideas applicable to Middle Eastern societies.’’
A few weeks later, Bookchin replied, expressing reluctance to engage in a dialogue. ‘‘You should know that I am quite an elderly man … who is virtually incapable of walking because of osteoarthritis and heart problems,’’ Bookchin wrote. ‘‘Much remains to be explored, which my health and age prohibit me from doing. If you care to write to me further, I ask you to please be patient with an old radical.’’
In March 2005, Ocalan issued the ‘‘Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan.’’ By then, Bookchin had cut off communication. (‘‘Bookchin was heartbroken,’’ Biehl told me. ‘‘He was devastated that the revolution had never happened, and he didn’t trust anybody.’’) The manifesto called on all P.K.K. supporters to implement a version of Bookchin’s ideas; Ocalan urged all guerrilla fighters to read ‘‘The Ecology of Freedom.’’ He instructed his followers to stop attacking the government and instead create municipal assemblies, which he called ‘‘democracy without the state.’’ These assemblies would form a grand confederation that would extend across all Kurdish regions of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran and would be united by a common set of values based on defending the environment; respecting religious, political and cultural pluralism; and self-defense. He insisted that women be made equal leaders at all levels of society. ‘‘The worldview for which I stand,’’ Ocalan told his lawyers privately, ‘‘is very close to that of Bookchin.’’
When news spread throughout the P.K.K. of Ocalan’s conversion, some were naturally hesitant to abandon the old model of Marxist-Leninist terrorism. ‘‘Who cares about some marginal anarchist with 50 followers?’’ one P.K.K. commander supposedly complained. But in the end, they followed orders. The female leadership, in particular, embraced the new ideology. The P.K.K. set about forming clandestine assemblies immediately in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, waiting for the opportunity to expand. Bookchin ‘‘was the greatest social scientist of the 20th century,’’ according to a P.K.K. tribute sent to Biehl after Bookchin’s death in July 2006. ‘‘Bookchin has not died. … We undertake to make [him] live in our struggle.’’
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His ExcellencyRecep Tayyip Erdoğan
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Syria Kurds' Women Warriors
WOMEN PLAY A PROMINENT ROLE IN THE KURDISTAN ARMED FORCES. FOR EXAMPLE, THE PEOPLES PROTECTION UNITS IN SYRIAN KURDISTAN (YPG) ARE COMPRISED OF 35 PERCENT FEMALE SOLDIERS. THIS INCLUDES A 7,500 ALL-VOLUNTEER FEMALE GROUP CURRENTLY BATTLING ISIS IN SYRIA. BY COMPARISON, THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS HAS ONLY 14,000 FEMALE SOLDIERS.
Efelin, a 20-year-old fighter vowed that if Isis tried to come back, they "won't leave a single one of them alive".
As far as I know, the Islamic state is the only organization that has religious texts written by justifying rape. Who rapes an unfaithful (a non-Muslim woman) automatically becomes Muslim. (Report here). Besides causing horror, is this too is a strategy for enlisting soldiers in those cultures where dating and sex are prohibited. The guy comes to EI to be able to have sex and ideology constructed the free of any blame. It is an unprecedented cruelty. The members of the EI believe that killing and raping rather go to heaven, where they will receive 72 virgins. (On the origins of belief). [This blog does not assertthatthis is true, but only that many Syrian Kurds believe it is. And perhaps many Islamic State recruits.]
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