Indus Pakistan
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@Dai Toruko Honestly, did you have to post these images. On top of that these are females for gawds sakes. It serves no purpose whatsoever.
Kurdish women release movie called Sisters In Arms to advocate feminism and scare Turks
- Thread starter Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
- Start date
Paet tu bhar raha hay na atleast, ek jiyala ku aur chahye kia roti, kapra aur makkan.
are these just dead Kurdish soldiers? Nothing wrong with dead terrorist Kurds but pics should not be posted.
damm1t
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El Sidd
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health and education
masterchief_mirza
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See this is the problem that orientalist losers have and why they keep regurgitating the same terrorist sympathising tripe. What you are doing is romanticising a terrorist group, which is precisely how western islamophobes and turcophobes behave towards these Kurdish fighters. They exploit them to further an anti-Turk and pro-terror agenda. A good looking female terrorist is still a terrorist. Not only that, but by posting good looking ones only, you are sexualising them further. They are used for propaganda, cannon fodder and possibly as comfort women by terrorist groups, and here you are reduplicating the same old tired orientalist wet dream of Amazonian princesses fighting the evil Turks and liberating Kurdistan - when in reality, these Kurdish terror outfits and their supporters are simply exploiting these females. Turkey is by far the more progressive and modern facing nation, while these rebels still deal in medieval tribalism and honour killings.
Retarded indian shit posts from wiki and claims its proof lol
LOL they didn't do anything against Daesh. There is zero physical evidence for this you lying sack of dog shit.
You must be very happy that these female terrorists have mutilated genitals.
All of them LOL.How much of these sex slaves are dead now?
Their mutilated genitals couldn't save them.
According to the Kurds themselves, ALL women are whores and sex-slaves and that is why their genitals are mutilated. And these sluts now deserve their own country because they know how to pose for a camera? LOL LOL LOL
this is hilarious...
though give credit to the kurds. they know how to milk western propaganda..
western media and movies love the ultra strong feminist fighter kicking ***... they even started random rumours that isis was afraid of female PKK because if they got killed by a woman, they wouldn't go to heaven or something.
this will get them on the good side of western social justice warriors. all they lack now is a LGBT unit combatting homophobia and kicking ISIS *** to really get the western idiots to jizz their pants.
though give credit to the kurds. they know how to milk western propaganda..
western media and movies love the ultra strong feminist fighter kicking ***... they even started random rumours that isis was afraid of female PKK because if they got killed by a woman, they wouldn't go to heaven or something.
this will get them on the good side of western social justice warriors. all they lack now is a LGBT unit combatting homophobia and kicking ISIS *** to really get the western idiots to jizz their pants.
It's an indication of the innate hate and depravity.
Stomach churning.
Cheers, Doc
You have zero idea of where I come from with the Kurds.
They might be terrorists to you and the Turks.
They are my brothers and sisters (cousins) and I have met and interacted with hundreds in my personal life.
They are fighting a fight that will soon ignite and engulf the middle East in righteous cleansing flames of Asha.
And there are hundreds of millions of Indian rupees that are being pumped into their cause.
So yeah, threads that debase them disgust me. As do those who participate, regardless of nationality or faith.
Cheers, Doc
masterchief_mirza
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Good luck with your resurrection or uprising or whatever footnote in history you seem to be propagating. And as for Indians, I doubt that even they would be so stupid as to pick a fight with Turkey. The Kurds are unlikely to be of any interest to them other than oil dealings.
Mithridates
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lol this thread is full of weirdos.
Hindus do not pick a fight where there are other ways of getting things done.
There are a number of very right wing think tanks that see Kurdistan as an once in a millennium opportunity and an extension and natural progression of their dharmic territorial aspirations.
Strategic depth.
Obviously Iran and Afghanistan are closely linked.
But for now it is private money. And religious oversight, guidance, training, and internships.
Someone here said the Kurds are mainly Sunni and conservative.
They are conservative for sure, but they are strongly ethnonationalistic over that. And the more they bleed to hard-line Sunni forces, the stronger is their tilt away from that.
It was never our fight.
They chose us and came to us.
Our goals are still the same. Just via a different route.
Cheers, Doc
Would India Support a Post-ISIS Independence Push by the Kurds?
How involved does New Delhi want to be?
By Kabir Taneja
February 27, 2017
The fight against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) over large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria captured by the terror group in its juggernaut expansion and declaration of the “caliphate” in 2014 will at some point be coming to a conclusion. And with that will come a new set of challenges for the region.
While the Iraqi Army along with its affiliates has orchestrated a major push from the south on the ISIS’s bastion city of Mosul, the Kurds have moved in from the north to close in amidst hope of permanently stamping out the structures of the Islamic State from the northern spheres of Iraq. The success of these operations, which have over the past few months started to show as ISIS dwindles, has also started to give the Kurds more impunity to push for one of their own long-standing demands, the declaration of the independent state of Kurdistan.
In the north of Mosul, not far from the capital city Erbil of the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS have dug-in deep and built trenches well beyond the territory that they currently govern, stretching more than 1,050 km in northern Iraq into land that was under the Iraqi Arabs before ISIS took over. According to reports, the Iraqi Kurds have orchestrated the takeover of this land as a standing policy being pushed by officials of the Kurdish government in Erbil. This is seen as spoils for the sacrifices made by the Kurds, known to be the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state, who have fought ISIS through thick and thin for a stronger push in post-ISIS Iraq on their long-standing call on the formation of a fully independent and sovereign state of Kurdistan.
Currently, Erbil is used not just by the Kurds but various militias that are fighting ISIS as a place to rest and replenish before going back to the frontlines such as in Mosul, Al-Bab and elsewhere The Kurdish fighters believe that many of the insurgents currently fighting in battle-hardened areas such as Mosul are in fact crime syndicates that have adopted the veil of the so-called Islamic State. Older groups such as Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Jaesh-al-Mujahideen, who were always known as Daesh (the Arabic term for ISIS) perhaps pose the biggest challenge for the Kurds, and indeed the people of Mosul and adjoining regions have been confronting this challenge since long before ISIS.
As a result of the Kurds’ battle with ISIS, they have gained increasing amount of legitimacy amongst certain sections of the international order involved in the regional conflict. The Kurdish Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG), also known as the People’s Protection Unit, an infantry militia largely made up of Kurdish fighters, is known to be a “democratic” army that holds internal elections to appoint commanders. The YPG has its roots in the formation of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) in 2003 as one of the Kurdish opposition parties in the Syrian parliament. Today, perhaps as reward for its efforts against ISIS and for the interests of the Kurdish people, the YPG has official diplomatic missions in Prague, Stockholm and Berlin, and a new one in Moscow, with another in Paris planned for the near future. Analysts believe that Beijing could host the first such YPG mission in Asia.
Both India and China now have operating consulates in Erbil. In August of last year, New Delhi opened the doors to its official consulate in the Kurdish city, offering full consular services. Deepak Miglani, an Indian Foreign Services officer with prior experience of serving in other conflict hotspots such as Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan was appointed as the first consul general in Erbil. This not only expanded India’s diplomatic access in the larger Middle East region, which hosts more than 8.2 million Indians, but added an interesting aspect to India’s security outreach and validated the battles of the Kurdish forces against ISIS and its regional offshoots.
The autonomous government of Erbil has long been asking India to take a bigger presence in the region. New Delhi’s apprehensions had been warranted, as it did not wish to sour relations with Baghdad, which views the growing calls for autonomy from the Iraqi Kurdistan, specifically related to the production of oil, as in direct conflict to the interests of the central Iraqi government. Both New Delhi and Beijing have economic interests there as well, with China’s SINOPEC acquiring Addax Petroleum, which developed the Taq Taq oil field near Kirkuk. India has also previously bought oil from Kurdistan via Turkish companies and Mumbai based Reliance Industries Ltd in 2007 had invested in two oil blocks in Kurdistan, Rova and Sarta, only to sell majority stakes in both in 2012 after pressure from Baghdad.
Erbil has previously taken center stage whenever Indian diaspora in the region have been caught in the regional conflicts. In 2015, India launched a diplomatic effort to track down 39 missing construction workers who had reportedly been taken hostage by ISIS and have since then been known to have been killed, a claim corroborated via multiple sources (although the Indian government has yet to declare them as deceased). During that period, India sent its experienced Middle East hand and former Ambassador to Iraq, Suresh K. Reddy, to Baghdad and then Erbil in an effort to use contacts with former Ba’athist leaders from Saddam’s regime, some of whom are now high-ranking commanders in ISIS for regions such as Mosul and Tikrit. Other Indian diplomats with regional experience such as Sanjaya Rana and Arabic-speaking officer Abu Mathen George were also sent to Erbil, not only to help in gathering information about the missing Indians, but inadvertently also cement India’s narrative in the Kurdish region.
In 2014, during the peak expansion period of ISIS, the Kurdish Democratic Party’s then head of international relations, Heman Harwani, told India’s The Hindu newspaper that the “old Iraq is dead” and that the future perhaps holds a confederation of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states or an out-and-out partition of the country. “We have to move forward now, and see India as an important partner,” Harwani added.
Indian Ambassador to Iraq George Raju’s visit to Erbil in May 2016 can be seen as a major move for India to gather a strong diplomatic foothold there. Last year, after the ambassador’s visit, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) sought India’s help for its war against ISIS. Falah Mustafa, the head of KRG’s Department of Foreign Relations called on India to assist the region with humanitarian aid and, perhaps more importantly, military assistance. Mustafa conveyed this to Miglani during his first briefing as Consul General. The Kurdish region is today home to more than 1.8 million refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDP) of Iraq from all walks of life.
However, with this recent Indian outreach to the Kurds, it begs the question: Is New Delhi is prepared to support the larger cause of the Kurdish people as well? This cause is in direct conflict with the position of the Iraqi government and of course that of regional heavyweight, Turkey. This latter views the Kurds as a greater long-term peril to its own interests than ISIS, which explains why Ankara turned a blind eye towards the terror outfit during its early rise, hoping it would confront Kurdish militias.
India has long maintained a balanced approached in the region. New Delhi is comfortable without much moral or ethical conundrum of who rules states in the larger Middle East region as long as its own large diaspora is protected. A sudden collapse, such as the one witnessed in Yemen recently where India orchestrated a large evacuation operation by air and water, is perhaps its biggest lingering headache. New Delhi has held good relations with all, whether it is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran. New Delhi’s base argument is not intertwined in any long-term “plan,” but on the principles of maintaining stability in the region, whether that is via dictatorship or democracy, so as to protect its 8 million plus people, their remittances to India worth more than $40 billion every year, and the security of India’s oil supplies, as it imports more than 70 percent of its requirements from abroad and most of it coming from the Gulf states and Iran.
It is extremely unlikely that India would any military aid to the Kurds in their fight against ISIS. However, it is more than probable that humanitarian aid in the form of medicines, tents, portable housing, food and other support could be initiated in the future directly with Erbil instead of going through the UN, specifically as ISIS’s hold on that part of Iraq rapidly dwindles and more so with the Development Partnership Administration (DPA), India’s answer to USAID and UK’s DFID, signing up with other agencies such as the U.S.-based Millennium Challenge Corporation to exclusively provide aidto third world nations. Beyond this, under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has also been proactive in marketing itself as a “friend” of poor nations, using the Indian Air Force as a soft-power tool by flying in aid to countries hit by natural disaster, from Nepal to Fiji.
India’s approach to the Kurds could mirror its approach in Afghanistan. While it is going to stay away from taking a stance on the issue of a Kurdish push for an independent state, it will provide developmental aid and projects in areas that will help build India’s image as a force of positivity and a country doing good for the people. This, then, automatically means that KRG’s calls for military assistance against ISIS will not find many takers on Raisina Hill. And that is a tried-and-tested foreign policy status quo India seems comfortable with in the Middle East.
Kabir Taneja is a journalist and researcher specializing in foreign affairs, energy security, and defense.
A balanced article .... as I said, on the face of it, the Hindu will hold his cards close to his chest. And smile at all.
Cheers, Doc
How involved does New Delhi want to be?
By Kabir Taneja
February 27, 2017
The fight against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) over large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria captured by the terror group in its juggernaut expansion and declaration of the “caliphate” in 2014 will at some point be coming to a conclusion. And with that will come a new set of challenges for the region.
While the Iraqi Army along with its affiliates has orchestrated a major push from the south on the ISIS’s bastion city of Mosul, the Kurds have moved in from the north to close in amidst hope of permanently stamping out the structures of the Islamic State from the northern spheres of Iraq. The success of these operations, which have over the past few months started to show as ISIS dwindles, has also started to give the Kurds more impunity to push for one of their own long-standing demands, the declaration of the independent state of Kurdistan.
In the north of Mosul, not far from the capital city Erbil of the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS have dug-in deep and built trenches well beyond the territory that they currently govern, stretching more than 1,050 km in northern Iraq into land that was under the Iraqi Arabs before ISIS took over. According to reports, the Iraqi Kurds have orchestrated the takeover of this land as a standing policy being pushed by officials of the Kurdish government in Erbil. This is seen as spoils for the sacrifices made by the Kurds, known to be the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state, who have fought ISIS through thick and thin for a stronger push in post-ISIS Iraq on their long-standing call on the formation of a fully independent and sovereign state of Kurdistan.
Currently, Erbil is used not just by the Kurds but various militias that are fighting ISIS as a place to rest and replenish before going back to the frontlines such as in Mosul, Al-Bab and elsewhere The Kurdish fighters believe that many of the insurgents currently fighting in battle-hardened areas such as Mosul are in fact crime syndicates that have adopted the veil of the so-called Islamic State. Older groups such as Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Jaesh-al-Mujahideen, who were always known as Daesh (the Arabic term for ISIS) perhaps pose the biggest challenge for the Kurds, and indeed the people of Mosul and adjoining regions have been confronting this challenge since long before ISIS.
As a result of the Kurds’ battle with ISIS, they have gained increasing amount of legitimacy amongst certain sections of the international order involved in the regional conflict. The Kurdish Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG), also known as the People’s Protection Unit, an infantry militia largely made up of Kurdish fighters, is known to be a “democratic” army that holds internal elections to appoint commanders. The YPG has its roots in the formation of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) in 2003 as one of the Kurdish opposition parties in the Syrian parliament. Today, perhaps as reward for its efforts against ISIS and for the interests of the Kurdish people, the YPG has official diplomatic missions in Prague, Stockholm and Berlin, and a new one in Moscow, with another in Paris planned for the near future. Analysts believe that Beijing could host the first such YPG mission in Asia.
Both India and China now have operating consulates in Erbil. In August of last year, New Delhi opened the doors to its official consulate in the Kurdish city, offering full consular services. Deepak Miglani, an Indian Foreign Services officer with prior experience of serving in other conflict hotspots such as Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan was appointed as the first consul general in Erbil. This not only expanded India’s diplomatic access in the larger Middle East region, which hosts more than 8.2 million Indians, but added an interesting aspect to India’s security outreach and validated the battles of the Kurdish forces against ISIS and its regional offshoots.
The autonomous government of Erbil has long been asking India to take a bigger presence in the region. New Delhi’s apprehensions had been warranted, as it did not wish to sour relations with Baghdad, which views the growing calls for autonomy from the Iraqi Kurdistan, specifically related to the production of oil, as in direct conflict to the interests of the central Iraqi government. Both New Delhi and Beijing have economic interests there as well, with China’s SINOPEC acquiring Addax Petroleum, which developed the Taq Taq oil field near Kirkuk. India has also previously bought oil from Kurdistan via Turkish companies and Mumbai based Reliance Industries Ltd in 2007 had invested in two oil blocks in Kurdistan, Rova and Sarta, only to sell majority stakes in both in 2012 after pressure from Baghdad.
Erbil has previously taken center stage whenever Indian diaspora in the region have been caught in the regional conflicts. In 2015, India launched a diplomatic effort to track down 39 missing construction workers who had reportedly been taken hostage by ISIS and have since then been known to have been killed, a claim corroborated via multiple sources (although the Indian government has yet to declare them as deceased). During that period, India sent its experienced Middle East hand and former Ambassador to Iraq, Suresh K. Reddy, to Baghdad and then Erbil in an effort to use contacts with former Ba’athist leaders from Saddam’s regime, some of whom are now high-ranking commanders in ISIS for regions such as Mosul and Tikrit. Other Indian diplomats with regional experience such as Sanjaya Rana and Arabic-speaking officer Abu Mathen George were also sent to Erbil, not only to help in gathering information about the missing Indians, but inadvertently also cement India’s narrative in the Kurdish region.
In 2014, during the peak expansion period of ISIS, the Kurdish Democratic Party’s then head of international relations, Heman Harwani, told India’s The Hindu newspaper that the “old Iraq is dead” and that the future perhaps holds a confederation of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states or an out-and-out partition of the country. “We have to move forward now, and see India as an important partner,” Harwani added.
Indian Ambassador to Iraq George Raju’s visit to Erbil in May 2016 can be seen as a major move for India to gather a strong diplomatic foothold there. Last year, after the ambassador’s visit, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) sought India’s help for its war against ISIS. Falah Mustafa, the head of KRG’s Department of Foreign Relations called on India to assist the region with humanitarian aid and, perhaps more importantly, military assistance. Mustafa conveyed this to Miglani during his first briefing as Consul General. The Kurdish region is today home to more than 1.8 million refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDP) of Iraq from all walks of life.
However, with this recent Indian outreach to the Kurds, it begs the question: Is New Delhi is prepared to support the larger cause of the Kurdish people as well? This cause is in direct conflict with the position of the Iraqi government and of course that of regional heavyweight, Turkey. This latter views the Kurds as a greater long-term peril to its own interests than ISIS, which explains why Ankara turned a blind eye towards the terror outfit during its early rise, hoping it would confront Kurdish militias.
India has long maintained a balanced approached in the region. New Delhi is comfortable without much moral or ethical conundrum of who rules states in the larger Middle East region as long as its own large diaspora is protected. A sudden collapse, such as the one witnessed in Yemen recently where India orchestrated a large evacuation operation by air and water, is perhaps its biggest lingering headache. New Delhi has held good relations with all, whether it is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran. New Delhi’s base argument is not intertwined in any long-term “plan,” but on the principles of maintaining stability in the region, whether that is via dictatorship or democracy, so as to protect its 8 million plus people, their remittances to India worth more than $40 billion every year, and the security of India’s oil supplies, as it imports more than 70 percent of its requirements from abroad and most of it coming from the Gulf states and Iran.
It is extremely unlikely that India would any military aid to the Kurds in their fight against ISIS. However, it is more than probable that humanitarian aid in the form of medicines, tents, portable housing, food and other support could be initiated in the future directly with Erbil instead of going through the UN, specifically as ISIS’s hold on that part of Iraq rapidly dwindles and more so with the Development Partnership Administration (DPA), India’s answer to USAID and UK’s DFID, signing up with other agencies such as the U.S.-based Millennium Challenge Corporation to exclusively provide aidto third world nations. Beyond this, under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has also been proactive in marketing itself as a “friend” of poor nations, using the Indian Air Force as a soft-power tool by flying in aid to countries hit by natural disaster, from Nepal to Fiji.
India’s approach to the Kurds could mirror its approach in Afghanistan. While it is going to stay away from taking a stance on the issue of a Kurdish push for an independent state, it will provide developmental aid and projects in areas that will help build India’s image as a force of positivity and a country doing good for the people. This, then, automatically means that KRG’s calls for military assistance against ISIS will not find many takers on Raisina Hill. And that is a tried-and-tested foreign policy status quo India seems comfortable with in the Middle East.
Kabir Taneja is a journalist and researcher specializing in foreign affairs, energy security, and defense.
A balanced article .... as I said, on the face of it, the Hindu will hold his cards close to his chest. And smile at all.
Cheers, Doc
I Fought ISIS with the Kurds In Syria. This Is What It Was Like
Robert Amos
Former volunteer for Kurdish armed forces in Syria
I dropped out of school to join the fight against tyranny. I learned much more than I had expected.
“The Jews and the Kurds, we are alone in the Middle East,” a fighter named Zagros told me as I was leaving Syrian Kurdistan. “Go back to Israel and tell the Kurdish Jews in Israel that they are welcome back here in Kurdistan.”
I had been there for almost six months fighting ISIS alongside Kurdish soldiers. A year before, I had been a graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying politics and sociology. But after I saw the horrible images of the rape and destruction of Yazidi communities in Iraq, and without any previous military training, I put down my studies and went to Syrian Kurdistan to fight.
I was not alone in this. There were many foreign fighters participating in the Kurdish struggle, and we were now on our way back home, waiting at a transit camp in the beautiful forested mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Zagros, who temporarily helped run the camp, was a local and an experienced fighter. As we stepped outside the tent, he told me that his village used to be home to many Jews.
Jewish history in Kurdistan goes back many centuries. Kurdistan is part of the land in which the Babylonian Talmud was crafted. Many prominent rabbis and prophets lived and died there. Before every Shabbat, Jews around the world recite the candle lighting blessings from the Siddur written by Nachum the Mede, a Kurdish Jew. In the 17th century, the very first female rabbi, Asenath Barzani, was born in Kurdistan. The Star of David was probably first used as a symbol of Judaism by David Alroy, a Kurdish Jewish warlord and rebel against the Islamic Caliphate in the 12th century. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, was a Kurd.
In recent years, the fight against ISIS has evoked much symbolic solidarity between Iraqi Kurds and Israelis. The reasons for this friendship include their shared values and historical connections, as well as the common enemy of Islamist terror. For these and other reasons, Syria’s Kurds could be an even greater partner with Israel than their brothers in Iraq.
The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless people. After World War I, Kurdistan was split into four different countries, making them a universal minority. After this dismemberment, each area of Kurdistan has attempted to achieve independence at one time or another. Until recently, Iraqi Kurdistan was the only one to win relative autonomy. But since 2011, a new autonomous democracy known as Rojava has been established in Syrian Kurdistan. Rojava is the Kurdish word for “west” or “western Kurdistan.” Many around the world have heard of the Iraqi Kurdish army known as the Peshmerga, but in Rojava, those fighting for their homes are known as the YPG, the Kurdish acronym for “People’s Protection Units.”
When ISIS massacred the Yezidis in the Shingal area of Iraq, the Peshmerga lines fell back, allowing ISIS to enter the region. Thousands of Yezidi families fled and were trapped without food or water in the desert mountains. It looked hopeless, but when no local or foreign power did anything to rescue the Yazidis, the YPG crossed the border from Syria and pushed ISIS back long enough to create a corridor to safety, saving thousands of lives. These images motivated me to join the YPG.
After this battle, recruitment swelled, and many Westerners and Kurds joined the YPG. As a result, the Yezidis are more loyal to Syrian Kurdistan than to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. When I was fighting in Tell Hamis, I met one Yezidi who stayed with us for several days. He told me that he was on his way to another location for military training. Before the war against ISIS, the Yezidis had insisted on autonomy from the KRG. After the massacre, they trusted the KRG even less, and began to align themselves with the Syrian Kurds who helped train them and create a new satellite militia known as YBŞ, the Shingal Resistance Units.
As I spoke Kurdish with my Yazidi friend near the front lines, we faced Mount Shingal, which loomed over the Iraqi-Syrian border. He told me that he knew of 10 childhood friends who were executed by ISIS because of their religion. Their women were sold into sexual slavery. On the mountain that night we would occasionally see lights from PKK and YBŞ units. Between us there was a long desert plain under the rule of ISIS. And to the north, completing the horseshoe-shaped frontline, was the Peshmerga.
There is no usable airport in Syrian Kurdistan, so to get to Rojava I had to land in Iraqi Kurdistan first. My contact had given me nothing but a phone number and the instruction to fly to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Not knowing Sorani, the largest Kurdish dialect in Iraq, I handed a piece of paper with the phone number to the taxi driver. A phone call was made and the driver dropped me off in front of what I thought was an abandoned park.
After a few minutes, I was approached by my contact. He talked very little and I followed him down several streets into a back alley. A door opened and I saw three Westerners sitting in the room—one from Texas, another from England, and a third from Portugal. All of them had the same goal I did, but told me they weren’t sure what they were doing there. One had been there for around a week. We all concluded that this was some sort of safe house.
I slept for two hours when I was awakened by a Kurd yelling “Bichin, bichin Rojava” (“We’re going, we’re going to Rojava”), which I thought was, well, bitchin’. I jumped into the back seat of a car with the Brit and the Texan. The driver drove like a madman, weaving in and out of cars for hours until we reached our destination in the middle of a lush, wooded, mountainous wilderness. There, we stayed at a transit camp with about 15 Westerners who, like me, were waiting to enter Rojava to join the YPG. It was a great comfort for me to meet likeminded people who didn’t think I was crazy.
I met three different types of foreign fighters there. Some had a previous military career. Others were motivated by purely humanitarian concerns. Most of us had seen the pictures of the horrible massacres of Yazidis. Those of us who were Jews all saw a connection to the Holocaust. We felt the same indifference from the world and we all wanted to do something.
Photo: Robert Amos
The third group was motivated by socialist or anarchist ideology. Most of these idealists were preachy hipsters from the U.S. and Europe who came to join La Revolución, but were quickly disillusioned by how different the people of Syrian Kurdistan were from what they imagined. The Syrian Kurds did have an ideal and they were creating a real revolution, but it was not really the type that would be attractive to international socialists. One of the ideologues I met was an anarchist hacktivist from London. Every night, we would fall asleep listening to his utopian ideas of revolution. Another fighter told me that he had seen the hacktivist in the customs line at Sulaymaniyah airport. He was pulled aside and one of his bags was opened to reveal that it was full of Guy Fawkes masks, a symbol of the hacktivist group Anonymous. This hipster had bizarre romantic ideas of turning the YPG into an Anonymous army. Not all of the anarchists had such quixotic aspirations, however. Some were there for the right reasons and put humanitarian concerns in their rightful place above politics.
When I arrived in Rojava, I was surprised by how similar the spirit was to the early Zionist pioneers. We did not have any ideological indoctrination, as some of the Kurds did. But we were given a brief ideological introduction to explain the Syrian Kurds’ political goals to us.
There was a very strong spirit of optimism and a belief that anything was possible if one’s desire and will were strong enough. Everything in this new country had changed and everything had started anew. Our instructor told various anecdotes of small groups of fighters holding off vastly superior forces and other feats that people had said were impossible. This wasn’t just propaganda. It was all quite true. As I later came to realize, we were experiencing a nationalist optimism and an expression of collective human will at a level that I had only heard of in relation to those who helped found the Jewish state. We were living what the early Zionists had experienced.
Soldiers from the YBŞ and PKK hold up a painting of their political leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Photo: Kurdish Struggle / flickr
Before we entered the kitchen every morning for breakfast we were greeted by a giant life-size picture of Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader and philosopher currently jailed by Turkey. Öcalan (pronounced “O-ja-lan”) is affectionately known to the Kurds as Apo (“uncle”). His followers are known as Apoçî or Apoists. The Syrian Kurds are profoundly influenced by Apoism. We were informed, for example, that equality between the sexes is not just a major tenet of their ideology, but rigorously enforced by military protocol, beyond anything in the West. In an active battlefield situation a man could never command a woman, but a woman could command a man. Such a situation mandated that a woman take command over any situation with mixed groups. I personally witnessed this practice on the battlefield, where my favorite commander was a woman. The female fighters of Rojava are known as the YPJ, the “Women’s Protection Units,” the female counterpart of the YPG.
In revolutionary Rojava, Kurds are much less traditional than Kurds in Iraq. Of the Kurdish fighters I met, only about half self-identified as Muslim. And of those, only half seemed to know much about Islam at all. I never saw anyone pray. Of the non-Muslim Kurdish fighters, half were agnostic or atheist; some, when asked about their religion, would humorously say that they were Apoists. The other half were from other faiths: Some were indigenous Christians, such as Assyrians or Armenians; but more often than not, they were Kurds who, seeking a distinctly Kurdish faith, converted to Zoroastrianism.
There is much in common between today’s Kurdish fighters and the pioneers who built and protected the State of Israel in its early years.
The PYD party largely controls Rojava and the YPG, and one day during training we were visited by a party official. We sat down on the floor of a trailer for a few minutes as the official explained the party’s philosophy and goals for Syria. He told us that nationalism had failed humanity and it was no longer the goal of the PYD to achieve independence in the form of a nation-state. I found this a bit surprising, because I definitely felt a desire for political independence in the atmosphere around me. But this was all a part of the PYD philosophy known as communalism. It envisioned a political order built on the idea of autonomy and cooperation of local communities. Each community would be completely autonomous and even control its own defense with little central authority.
Much of this came from Öcalan’s personal philosophy. He initially toyed with Marxist-Leninist theory, but rejected it in favor of something many Kurds told me was completely new and brilliant. I am usually skeptical whenever anyone thinks an ideology is completely new, so it took a while for these ideas to sink in.
Much later, while doing guard duty on the roof of our frontline base, I looked down on some off-duty YPG fighters playing volleyball. I began to think about who these people were. They were definitely not communists and they lacked any authoritarian hierarchy. They definitely weren’t anarchists either, despite what the hipsters thought. As I looked at one of the YPJ women guarding another post in the distance, it hit me. These people were kibbutzniks.
Everything began to make sense—the equality between the sexes in the community and on the battlefield, the sharing of everything in common, and the local autonomy of the community. It was all strangely reminiscent of the ideology of the early kibbutzim.
The most notable founder of the kibbutz movement, Yitzhak Tabenkin, like Öcalan, also toyed with Marxist-Leninist and anarchist ideologies. Tabenkin was an ardent Zionist, and a delegate to every Zionist Congress following World War I. But like Apo’s anti-statist vision for Kurdistan, Tabenkin was very much against a Jewish nation-state. He held that a socialist network of autonomous communities throughout the Middle East was the proper form of Zionism. He believed that the Sykes-Picot agreement that partitioned the Ottoman Empire into today’s array of Middle Eastern nation-states—and also dismembered Kurdistan—was an illegitimate product of Western imperialism that should be ignored in favor of his communalist vision.
Apoism has strong roots across the different Kurdish communities. Their organizations include the PKK in Turkey, PJAK in Iran, and PYD in Rojava. All of these organizations are members of an umbrella organization known as KCK. Today, Apoist organizations have by far the political influence in Kurdish society, surpassing any other movement. But they are also newcomers to the struggle, causing some jealousy in more traditional organizations.
In 1946 an independent Kurdish state known as the Mahabad Republic was declared around the city of Mahabad in defiance of the Iranian government. The establishment of this Kurdish state was largely the work of the KDP, the Kurdish Democratic Party. The Republic was crushed and its celebrated president executed, but the party lived on, creating branches in Iraq and Turkey. The momentum of the KDP’s resistance to Turkey, however, is minimal, late in coming, and overshadowed by the PKK, which began 14 years earlier. The KDP’s influence has been displaced in the southeastern half of Iraqi Kurdistan by the PUK, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which broke from the KDP in 1975. The KDP’s Iranian franchise still conducts armed resistance operations against the mullahs’ regime, but in Iraq the KDP’s political influence has been largely reduced to the area around Erbil and Duhuk, and the border with Rojava.
This change has met with a great deal of resentment among KDP party officials. Despite this rift, the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga came to the rescue of the ISIS-besieged Rojavan city of Kobani. During this Kurdish Battle of Stalingrad, rivalries were put aside for the common struggle.
There is no doubt that the two forces are very different. The Peshmerga is a conventional army and comparatively well-equipped with tanks and other heavy weapons, whereas in Rojava, the YPG lives a very Spartan existence, carrying out a Mad Max-style war against ISIS with homemade tank-like vehicles made of welded metal with tribal paint-jobs and modified pickup trucks laden with mounted mini-cannons and heavy machine guns. The Peshmerga has received much praise and some support from the West, and they should receive more. But the YPG is held together by wire, duct tape, and a determined spirit of resourceful optimism in dire need of a Western friend and patron.
The benefits of such a friend would be economic as well as strategic. Like Iraqi Kurdistan, Rojava is rich in oil. Israel’s economic alliance with Iraqi Kurdistan has been so fruitful that 77 percent of Israel’s oil supply now comes from the area. Unfortunately, due to a Turkish blockade, Rojava’s oil reserves have not yet been explored by the West. This kind of animosity is a constant in Turkey’s relationship with the Kurds. It has long opposed any recognition of Kurdish autonomy anywhere and has only recently established relations with the KRG. The Islamist-leaning government in Turkey has both actively and passively fostered the expansion of the Islamic State; not necessarily for ideological reasons, but because it fights the common Kurdish enemy.
When I was fighting west of Serê Kanîyê, I had the unique vantage point of being on the last YPG position before the Turkish border. Every morning we would hear the call to prayer from behind ISIS lines atop a hill with an old cemetery they had desecrated to create fortifications. To our right, we would watch Turkish tanks and APCs patrol the border. As far as I could see, most of this posturing was for show, as on occasion I would witness ISIS fighters cross the border under the watchful eye of the Turkish military. Turkey had no problem with this until a recent falling-out in their clandestine relationship with ISIS.
Photo: Robert Amos
For years Turkey has tried to court the West and harassed many governments into mislabeling the PKK a terrorist organization, even though it does not currently meet the necessary criteria. In April 2008, a European court ordered that the PKK be removed from a list of terror organizations for this very reason. In Turkey today the term “terrorist” has come to mean anyone who disagrees with or threatens the ruling political party, regardless of any armed resistance. But what most of us mean when we use the word “terrorism” is a form of resistance that is completely illegitimate, cruel, and immoral—namely, deliberately targeting civilians. Today, the PKK does not attack civilians, only police and military targets. It is more accurately described as a guerrilla force.
There is no comparison to Hamas, an organization that openly attacks Israeli civilians and freely operates in Turkey without any terrorist designation. Turkey and Israel used to have close relations, but today they do not, and it seems strange to sacrifice an alliance with the Kurds in order to mend a broken relationship with Turkey. Indeed, Turkey has repeatedly blocked Israel’s efforts to deepen its involvement in NATO and continues to harbor its enemies.
Israel has a long history of friendship with the KDP in Iraq, but it cannot attempt to foster a relationship with the Kurdish nation while only dealing with one part of it. Israel must reach out to the Apoist Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran.
On occasion I would go to a transit camp atop a mesa near the Turkish border. We would often stop there and remember the friends that had been there with us that were no longer among us, as they had fallen in battle.
To the south were dry rocking cliffs with a view of the semi-arid plan of Rojava. From below to the horizon was a scattered sea of dust and rusty oil rigs, most of which had fallen into disuse. To the north was the Turkish border. The view on the other side was a complete contrast, with rolling hills and towering Mount Judi, which would disappear into the clouds on a misty day. Muslim Kurds, Jewish Kurds, and local Christians all believed that this was one of the mountains of Ararat, on which Noah landed in his Ark. Behind the mountain was, according to legend, Shirnax, the first city built by Noah. And at night I could see the city of Cizre which holds Noah’s tomb. Large parts of both cities were completely destroyed by the Turkish military after I left Kurdistan. Many of the civilians had sought refuge in the basement of apartment buildings and were burned alive.
Last summer, the Turkish military, supported by a coalition of Wahhabi jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, invaded Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS. Instead, Turkey spent much of its resources trying to kill Kurdish fighters who were previously fighting against ISIS. Among those killed in the Turkish bombings was an American named Michael Israel, who had joined the YPG to fight against ISIS.
The Turkish government has already done too much for Israel to swallow. It is hard to understand what strategic advantage Israel gains from partnering with a government that supports Hamas and other terrorist organizations. At the same time, a free and independent Kurdistan seems inevitable. What part will Israel play in its history? Will Jerusalem only limit itself to a marginalized faction in Erbil? Or will it reach out to the entire Kurdish people?
A good read from the "other" side ...
Cheers, Doc
Robert Amos
Former volunteer for Kurdish armed forces in Syria
I dropped out of school to join the fight against tyranny. I learned much more than I had expected.
“The Jews and the Kurds, we are alone in the Middle East,” a fighter named Zagros told me as I was leaving Syrian Kurdistan. “Go back to Israel and tell the Kurdish Jews in Israel that they are welcome back here in Kurdistan.”
I had been there for almost six months fighting ISIS alongside Kurdish soldiers. A year before, I had been a graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying politics and sociology. But after I saw the horrible images of the rape and destruction of Yazidi communities in Iraq, and without any previous military training, I put down my studies and went to Syrian Kurdistan to fight.
I was not alone in this. There were many foreign fighters participating in the Kurdish struggle, and we were now on our way back home, waiting at a transit camp in the beautiful forested mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Zagros, who temporarily helped run the camp, was a local and an experienced fighter. As we stepped outside the tent, he told me that his village used to be home to many Jews.
Jewish history in Kurdistan goes back many centuries. Kurdistan is part of the land in which the Babylonian Talmud was crafted. Many prominent rabbis and prophets lived and died there. Before every Shabbat, Jews around the world recite the candle lighting blessings from the Siddur written by Nachum the Mede, a Kurdish Jew. In the 17th century, the very first female rabbi, Asenath Barzani, was born in Kurdistan. The Star of David was probably first used as a symbol of Judaism by David Alroy, a Kurdish Jewish warlord and rebel against the Islamic Caliphate in the 12th century. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, was a Kurd.
In recent years, the fight against ISIS has evoked much symbolic solidarity between Iraqi Kurds and Israelis. The reasons for this friendship include their shared values and historical connections, as well as the common enemy of Islamist terror. For these and other reasons, Syria’s Kurds could be an even greater partner with Israel than their brothers in Iraq.
The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless people. After World War I, Kurdistan was split into four different countries, making them a universal minority. After this dismemberment, each area of Kurdistan has attempted to achieve independence at one time or another. Until recently, Iraqi Kurdistan was the only one to win relative autonomy. But since 2011, a new autonomous democracy known as Rojava has been established in Syrian Kurdistan. Rojava is the Kurdish word for “west” or “western Kurdistan.” Many around the world have heard of the Iraqi Kurdish army known as the Peshmerga, but in Rojava, those fighting for their homes are known as the YPG, the Kurdish acronym for “People’s Protection Units.”
When ISIS massacred the Yezidis in the Shingal area of Iraq, the Peshmerga lines fell back, allowing ISIS to enter the region. Thousands of Yezidi families fled and were trapped without food or water in the desert mountains. It looked hopeless, but when no local or foreign power did anything to rescue the Yazidis, the YPG crossed the border from Syria and pushed ISIS back long enough to create a corridor to safety, saving thousands of lives. These images motivated me to join the YPG.
After this battle, recruitment swelled, and many Westerners and Kurds joined the YPG. As a result, the Yezidis are more loyal to Syrian Kurdistan than to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. When I was fighting in Tell Hamis, I met one Yezidi who stayed with us for several days. He told me that he was on his way to another location for military training. Before the war against ISIS, the Yezidis had insisted on autonomy from the KRG. After the massacre, they trusted the KRG even less, and began to align themselves with the Syrian Kurds who helped train them and create a new satellite militia known as YBŞ, the Shingal Resistance Units.
As I spoke Kurdish with my Yazidi friend near the front lines, we faced Mount Shingal, which loomed over the Iraqi-Syrian border. He told me that he knew of 10 childhood friends who were executed by ISIS because of their religion. Their women were sold into sexual slavery. On the mountain that night we would occasionally see lights from PKK and YBŞ units. Between us there was a long desert plain under the rule of ISIS. And to the north, completing the horseshoe-shaped frontline, was the Peshmerga.
There is no usable airport in Syrian Kurdistan, so to get to Rojava I had to land in Iraqi Kurdistan first. My contact had given me nothing but a phone number and the instruction to fly to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Not knowing Sorani, the largest Kurdish dialect in Iraq, I handed a piece of paper with the phone number to the taxi driver. A phone call was made and the driver dropped me off in front of what I thought was an abandoned park.
After a few minutes, I was approached by my contact. He talked very little and I followed him down several streets into a back alley. A door opened and I saw three Westerners sitting in the room—one from Texas, another from England, and a third from Portugal. All of them had the same goal I did, but told me they weren’t sure what they were doing there. One had been there for around a week. We all concluded that this was some sort of safe house.
I slept for two hours when I was awakened by a Kurd yelling “Bichin, bichin Rojava” (“We’re going, we’re going to Rojava”), which I thought was, well, bitchin’. I jumped into the back seat of a car with the Brit and the Texan. The driver drove like a madman, weaving in and out of cars for hours until we reached our destination in the middle of a lush, wooded, mountainous wilderness. There, we stayed at a transit camp with about 15 Westerners who, like me, were waiting to enter Rojava to join the YPG. It was a great comfort for me to meet likeminded people who didn’t think I was crazy.
I met three different types of foreign fighters there. Some had a previous military career. Others were motivated by purely humanitarian concerns. Most of us had seen the pictures of the horrible massacres of Yazidis. Those of us who were Jews all saw a connection to the Holocaust. We felt the same indifference from the world and we all wanted to do something.
Photo: Robert Amos
The third group was motivated by socialist or anarchist ideology. Most of these idealists were preachy hipsters from the U.S. and Europe who came to join La Revolución, but were quickly disillusioned by how different the people of Syrian Kurdistan were from what they imagined. The Syrian Kurds did have an ideal and they were creating a real revolution, but it was not really the type that would be attractive to international socialists. One of the ideologues I met was an anarchist hacktivist from London. Every night, we would fall asleep listening to his utopian ideas of revolution. Another fighter told me that he had seen the hacktivist in the customs line at Sulaymaniyah airport. He was pulled aside and one of his bags was opened to reveal that it was full of Guy Fawkes masks, a symbol of the hacktivist group Anonymous. This hipster had bizarre romantic ideas of turning the YPG into an Anonymous army. Not all of the anarchists had such quixotic aspirations, however. Some were there for the right reasons and put humanitarian concerns in their rightful place above politics.
When I arrived in Rojava, I was surprised by how similar the spirit was to the early Zionist pioneers. We did not have any ideological indoctrination, as some of the Kurds did. But we were given a brief ideological introduction to explain the Syrian Kurds’ political goals to us.
There was a very strong spirit of optimism and a belief that anything was possible if one’s desire and will were strong enough. Everything in this new country had changed and everything had started anew. Our instructor told various anecdotes of small groups of fighters holding off vastly superior forces and other feats that people had said were impossible. This wasn’t just propaganda. It was all quite true. As I later came to realize, we were experiencing a nationalist optimism and an expression of collective human will at a level that I had only heard of in relation to those who helped found the Jewish state. We were living what the early Zionists had experienced.
Soldiers from the YBŞ and PKK hold up a painting of their political leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Photo: Kurdish Struggle / flickr
Before we entered the kitchen every morning for breakfast we were greeted by a giant life-size picture of Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader and philosopher currently jailed by Turkey. Öcalan (pronounced “O-ja-lan”) is affectionately known to the Kurds as Apo (“uncle”). His followers are known as Apoçî or Apoists. The Syrian Kurds are profoundly influenced by Apoism. We were informed, for example, that equality between the sexes is not just a major tenet of their ideology, but rigorously enforced by military protocol, beyond anything in the West. In an active battlefield situation a man could never command a woman, but a woman could command a man. Such a situation mandated that a woman take command over any situation with mixed groups. I personally witnessed this practice on the battlefield, where my favorite commander was a woman. The female fighters of Rojava are known as the YPJ, the “Women’s Protection Units,” the female counterpart of the YPG.
In revolutionary Rojava, Kurds are much less traditional than Kurds in Iraq. Of the Kurdish fighters I met, only about half self-identified as Muslim. And of those, only half seemed to know much about Islam at all. I never saw anyone pray. Of the non-Muslim Kurdish fighters, half were agnostic or atheist; some, when asked about their religion, would humorously say that they were Apoists. The other half were from other faiths: Some were indigenous Christians, such as Assyrians or Armenians; but more often than not, they were Kurds who, seeking a distinctly Kurdish faith, converted to Zoroastrianism.
There is much in common between today’s Kurdish fighters and the pioneers who built and protected the State of Israel in its early years.
The PYD party largely controls Rojava and the YPG, and one day during training we were visited by a party official. We sat down on the floor of a trailer for a few minutes as the official explained the party’s philosophy and goals for Syria. He told us that nationalism had failed humanity and it was no longer the goal of the PYD to achieve independence in the form of a nation-state. I found this a bit surprising, because I definitely felt a desire for political independence in the atmosphere around me. But this was all a part of the PYD philosophy known as communalism. It envisioned a political order built on the idea of autonomy and cooperation of local communities. Each community would be completely autonomous and even control its own defense with little central authority.
Much of this came from Öcalan’s personal philosophy. He initially toyed with Marxist-Leninist theory, but rejected it in favor of something many Kurds told me was completely new and brilliant. I am usually skeptical whenever anyone thinks an ideology is completely new, so it took a while for these ideas to sink in.
Much later, while doing guard duty on the roof of our frontline base, I looked down on some off-duty YPG fighters playing volleyball. I began to think about who these people were. They were definitely not communists and they lacked any authoritarian hierarchy. They definitely weren’t anarchists either, despite what the hipsters thought. As I looked at one of the YPJ women guarding another post in the distance, it hit me. These people were kibbutzniks.
Everything began to make sense—the equality between the sexes in the community and on the battlefield, the sharing of everything in common, and the local autonomy of the community. It was all strangely reminiscent of the ideology of the early kibbutzim.
The most notable founder of the kibbutz movement, Yitzhak Tabenkin, like Öcalan, also toyed with Marxist-Leninist and anarchist ideologies. Tabenkin was an ardent Zionist, and a delegate to every Zionist Congress following World War I. But like Apo’s anti-statist vision for Kurdistan, Tabenkin was very much against a Jewish nation-state. He held that a socialist network of autonomous communities throughout the Middle East was the proper form of Zionism. He believed that the Sykes-Picot agreement that partitioned the Ottoman Empire into today’s array of Middle Eastern nation-states—and also dismembered Kurdistan—was an illegitimate product of Western imperialism that should be ignored in favor of his communalist vision.
Apoism has strong roots across the different Kurdish communities. Their organizations include the PKK in Turkey, PJAK in Iran, and PYD in Rojava. All of these organizations are members of an umbrella organization known as KCK. Today, Apoist organizations have by far the political influence in Kurdish society, surpassing any other movement. But they are also newcomers to the struggle, causing some jealousy in more traditional organizations.
In 1946 an independent Kurdish state known as the Mahabad Republic was declared around the city of Mahabad in defiance of the Iranian government. The establishment of this Kurdish state was largely the work of the KDP, the Kurdish Democratic Party. The Republic was crushed and its celebrated president executed, but the party lived on, creating branches in Iraq and Turkey. The momentum of the KDP’s resistance to Turkey, however, is minimal, late in coming, and overshadowed by the PKK, which began 14 years earlier. The KDP’s influence has been displaced in the southeastern half of Iraqi Kurdistan by the PUK, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which broke from the KDP in 1975. The KDP’s Iranian franchise still conducts armed resistance operations against the mullahs’ regime, but in Iraq the KDP’s political influence has been largely reduced to the area around Erbil and Duhuk, and the border with Rojava.
This change has met with a great deal of resentment among KDP party officials. Despite this rift, the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga came to the rescue of the ISIS-besieged Rojavan city of Kobani. During this Kurdish Battle of Stalingrad, rivalries were put aside for the common struggle.
There is no doubt that the two forces are very different. The Peshmerga is a conventional army and comparatively well-equipped with tanks and other heavy weapons, whereas in Rojava, the YPG lives a very Spartan existence, carrying out a Mad Max-style war against ISIS with homemade tank-like vehicles made of welded metal with tribal paint-jobs and modified pickup trucks laden with mounted mini-cannons and heavy machine guns. The Peshmerga has received much praise and some support from the West, and they should receive more. But the YPG is held together by wire, duct tape, and a determined spirit of resourceful optimism in dire need of a Western friend and patron.
The benefits of such a friend would be economic as well as strategic. Like Iraqi Kurdistan, Rojava is rich in oil. Israel’s economic alliance with Iraqi Kurdistan has been so fruitful that 77 percent of Israel’s oil supply now comes from the area. Unfortunately, due to a Turkish blockade, Rojava’s oil reserves have not yet been explored by the West. This kind of animosity is a constant in Turkey’s relationship with the Kurds. It has long opposed any recognition of Kurdish autonomy anywhere and has only recently established relations with the KRG. The Islamist-leaning government in Turkey has both actively and passively fostered the expansion of the Islamic State; not necessarily for ideological reasons, but because it fights the common Kurdish enemy.
When I was fighting west of Serê Kanîyê, I had the unique vantage point of being on the last YPG position before the Turkish border. Every morning we would hear the call to prayer from behind ISIS lines atop a hill with an old cemetery they had desecrated to create fortifications. To our right, we would watch Turkish tanks and APCs patrol the border. As far as I could see, most of this posturing was for show, as on occasion I would witness ISIS fighters cross the border under the watchful eye of the Turkish military. Turkey had no problem with this until a recent falling-out in their clandestine relationship with ISIS.
Photo: Robert Amos
For years Turkey has tried to court the West and harassed many governments into mislabeling the PKK a terrorist organization, even though it does not currently meet the necessary criteria. In April 2008, a European court ordered that the PKK be removed from a list of terror organizations for this very reason. In Turkey today the term “terrorist” has come to mean anyone who disagrees with or threatens the ruling political party, regardless of any armed resistance. But what most of us mean when we use the word “terrorism” is a form of resistance that is completely illegitimate, cruel, and immoral—namely, deliberately targeting civilians. Today, the PKK does not attack civilians, only police and military targets. It is more accurately described as a guerrilla force.
There is no comparison to Hamas, an organization that openly attacks Israeli civilians and freely operates in Turkey without any terrorist designation. Turkey and Israel used to have close relations, but today they do not, and it seems strange to sacrifice an alliance with the Kurds in order to mend a broken relationship with Turkey. Indeed, Turkey has repeatedly blocked Israel’s efforts to deepen its involvement in NATO and continues to harbor its enemies.
Israel has a long history of friendship with the KDP in Iraq, but it cannot attempt to foster a relationship with the Kurdish nation while only dealing with one part of it. Israel must reach out to the Apoist Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran.
On occasion I would go to a transit camp atop a mesa near the Turkish border. We would often stop there and remember the friends that had been there with us that were no longer among us, as they had fallen in battle.
To the south were dry rocking cliffs with a view of the semi-arid plan of Rojava. From below to the horizon was a scattered sea of dust and rusty oil rigs, most of which had fallen into disuse. To the north was the Turkish border. The view on the other side was a complete contrast, with rolling hills and towering Mount Judi, which would disappear into the clouds on a misty day. Muslim Kurds, Jewish Kurds, and local Christians all believed that this was one of the mountains of Ararat, on which Noah landed in his Ark. Behind the mountain was, according to legend, Shirnax, the first city built by Noah. And at night I could see the city of Cizre which holds Noah’s tomb. Large parts of both cities were completely destroyed by the Turkish military after I left Kurdistan. Many of the civilians had sought refuge in the basement of apartment buildings and were burned alive.
Last summer, the Turkish military, supported by a coalition of Wahhabi jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, invaded Syria under the pretext of fighting ISIS. Instead, Turkey spent much of its resources trying to kill Kurdish fighters who were previously fighting against ISIS. Among those killed in the Turkish bombings was an American named Michael Israel, who had joined the YPG to fight against ISIS.
The Turkish government has already done too much for Israel to swallow. It is hard to understand what strategic advantage Israel gains from partnering with a government that supports Hamas and other terrorist organizations. At the same time, a free and independent Kurdistan seems inevitable. What part will Israel play in its history? Will Jerusalem only limit itself to a marginalized faction in Erbil? Or will it reach out to the entire Kurdish people?
A good read from the "other" side ...
Cheers, Doc
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