Month: January 2019

Guest Post: Turkey’s war on Kurdistan’s forests

This is a December, 2018 article from their the Kurdish Internationalist Commune that describes Turkey’s immoral, illegal, and ecocidal actions in the mountains of Western Kurdistan (the region known as Rojava). It is being offered as a companion piece to Nicky Reid’s Lessons from Rojava, reblogged here recently.

For several years, during the dry summer season, Turkish military planes repeatedly drop incendiary devices in mountainous Kurdish areas to set forests ablaze. Villagers mobilize to combat the flames and usually manage to contain them, but large areas of mostly pine forest have been denuded, forcing migration of both humans and animals and destroying ecological habitats. If you never knew this is happening, you’re not alone. Search the ‘net as you might, you might doubt this is happening, but it surely is.

Whatever excuses Turkey might give for its relentless incendiary warfare along the Syrian border will not disguise its evilness. And this isn’t the first time such fires were set. When ISIS first occupied that area, Syria firebombed forests to block refugees from leaving the country. All Rojavans want is to be left alone to continue building the kind of egalitarian democracy they have worked so hard—against incredible odds and amid much suffering and deprivation—to create.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Turkey’s war on Kurdistan’s forests”

Guest Post: Lessons from Rojava

For hundreds if not thousands of years, Kurdistan, home to Kurdish minorities in present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, has been a pawn in regional and imperial power plays. And now, the Trump administration is about to sacrifice it yet again on the alter of hegemonic aspirations.

We’ve posted several times on the Syrian democratic anarcho-syndicalist revolution that over the past 3-4 years has birthed autonomous democratic and egalitarian  cantons in northern Syria. Formerly calling their polity Rojava but now the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, they rely on US forces to protect them from Assad, ISIS, and Turkey. But not, it appears, for long. I urge you to read Comrade Hermit’s analysis and to protest the impending betrayal of Rojava’s hard-won self-determination. Continue reading “Guest Post: Lessons from Rojava”