Author

Thoreau Redcrow 10 posts 0 comments

Dr. Thoreau Redcrow is an American global conflict analyst who specializes in geopolitics, stateless nations, and armed guerrilla movements. He is a frequent speaker before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva and has been a foreign policy advisor for several groups seeking self-determination. He has previously worked on the ground throughout Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Africa, and the Middle East. He was formerly the Co-Director of The Kurdish Center for Studies (English branch).

All that Rojava is: A Poem on the Revolution’s 12th Anniversary

July 19, 2024, marks the twelfth anniversary of the Rojava Revolution. Two years ago, on the tenth anniversary, I was asked by Hawar News Agency to give my thoughts on the occasion and what it signified for the world, based on my trips to the region. My time in Rojava (north and east Syria) witnessed […]

Weaponizing Wildfires: Deforestation as Dekurdification

Burning down forests so you can build castles upon the ashes sounds like an ancient moral parable about the pitfalls of rapaciousness, not a modern occupation strategy by the second largest military in NATO. The recent massive wildfires that ravaged Northern Kurdistan / Bakur (southeast Turkey) between Amed and Mêrdîn killed 15 people and left […]

Ankara’s Accomplice: How Europe Helps Suppress Kurdish Media Abroad

On April 23rd, 2024, around 200 armed Belgian federal police officers amassed at 1 a.m. in the town of Denderleeuw, in East Flanders (Belgium). Anyone observing this massive show of force and the militarized posture of the small army that was preparing for a nighttime siege, would have assumed they were about to storm an […]

40,000 Deaths: Dissecting Turkey’s “Big Lie” Against Kurdistan’s Guerrillas

With oppressive military occupations, state accusations serve as confessions. Since 1984, Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have been fighting an asymmetric resistance war against the Turkish military. Consequently, anyone who has ever read or watched Turkish state media (which at this point is the only press allowed to freely operate in the […]

Kurdish City & Child Names: The Battle Over Memory

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.” — Walter Benjamin As an occupied people without a state of their own, for the last century Kurds have had all elements of […]

No Devil Cuts His Own Claws: Sultanic Reflections

Erdoğan is not the requiem for Turkey, he is its reckoning. While it is tempting to agree with the wailing Western think tank literati and NGO industrial complex that authoritarian Erdoğan has finally killed off “Turkish democracy”, the unfortunate reality is that there was nothing left to kill. Since its foundation, the Turkish Republic has […]

Five Years of Hell & Evil: Turkish Occupied Afrin

Afrin (Efrîn) was 96% Kurdish on the first day of 2018. Today, the Kurdish population is less than 30%. Such a dramatic shift does not happen by accident, it occurred because of Turkey’s systematic and diabolical ethnic cleansing. Turkish occupied Afrin has become a demented laboratory for Ankara’s social engineering and cultural imperialism, where they […]

Attack on Amedspor: Why it is Bigger than Football

What do you call a country where athletes risk their life for competing on behalf of an occupied city? To find the answer, we have the football match between Amedspor and Bursaspor on Sunday March 5th at Bursa Metropolitan Stadium (two hours south of Istanbul), which was yet another example of what it means to […]

Why the Word “Terrorism” is more Dangerous than Terrorists

[Excerpt from the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers] Reporter: “Mr. Ben M’hidi, isn’t it a filthy thing to use women’s baskets to carry explosives for killing people?” Larbi Ben M’hidi: “Doesn’t it seem even filthier to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, wreaking even greater havoc? It would be better if we, too, had […]

Nonviolence is a Privilege Denied to Kurdish Guerrillas

“I don’t like having to shoot my gun. I wish there was another way to stop Turkey’s inhumanity, but there isn’t. We shoot to live. They shoot to kill.”  — A PKK guerrilla woman I interviewed in 2014 To paraphrase Arundhati Roy and Stokely Carmichael’s observations on the issue, non-violence is a piece of theatre […]