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“The councils have always been undoubtedly democratic, but in a sense never seen before and never thought about.” — Hannah Arendt As Greece and other parts of the world are once again engulfed by wildfires, while almost each day a new heat record is reached, an increasing number of people are realizing that the effects […]

Vian Hussein is a rising Kurdish artist from Rojava, living in the UK. Her powerfully emotive pieces breach the boundaries between art and activism and moves us boldly across the emotional terrain of identity, gender, and belonging. Vian is a child of the Syrian Civil War, the offspring of displacement and asylum, of long treacherous […]

Despite the risk of indictment, Donald Trump still seems to be enjoying considerable popularity in the United States. A survey conducted in 2021 revealed that 74% of American Republicans wanted Trump to run for president again in 2024. The news was significant then, and it is even more so now that the former president was […]

[names in this article have been changed to protect their identities] “Biji Kurdistan, Biji Kurdistan, Biji Kurdistan!” “şehîd namirin, şehîd namirin, şehîd namirin!” Somehow I had gotten sidetracked from my post-Uni holiday and found myself in the middle of a crowd of PKK members rushing an ambulance carrying their martyred friend back from the mountains. […]

Background In 2014, I took part in a pilot initiative aimed at gathering stories from Kurdish women. The project “Many Women, Many Words” sought to uncover the untold stories of women in Kurdistan during the period of Saddam Hussein’s rule and the Kurdish resistance. Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region within Iraq, experienced a deliberate genocide orchestrated […]

As suggested by the title of ‘Self-Determination Struggles: In Pursuit of the Democratic Confederalist Ideal’, the vaunted right to self-determination is worthy of deeper critical scrutiny. Rather than uncritically surveying historical and international struggles for self-determination, in his new collection of essays and papers then Cambridge University’s Thomas Jeffrey Miley scrutinises struggles about and within movements claiming […]

History is a terrifying place for the Kurds. It is a place fraught with geopolitical losses, displacement, subjugations, and horrific human rights violations. Undoubtedly, the Kurds have been the consistent losers in the historical and geopolitical events in the region in the past century. A series of treaties and events which occurred in early 20th […]

After the First World War, the Kurds, like other non-Turkish nationalities in the Ottoman empire, were presented with what seemed like a golden opportunity to establish their own nation-state. Articles 62 to 64 of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, called for the establishment of an independent Kurdish state.[1] However, these articles […]

The Lausanne treaty resulted in catastrophic consequences for the Kurds, the most obvious of which was statelessness. However, long after the imposition of the treaty, the Kurds continued to suffer a range of state imposed policies and consequences that affected their capacity to live with basic human rights and dignity. One such repercussion was the […]

The following is an exclusive interview with professor Thomas Schmidinger following his presentation during a two day international conference on the centenary of the Lausanne Treaty held in Hasaka, Rojava (Northeastern Syria). The international conference was organized by The Rojava Center for Strategic Studies and held on the 7th-8th of July. Professor Schmidinger is a Political Scientist […]

From the late medieval period until the mid-19th century, Kurdish lands were ruled by Kurdish hereditary chiefs. From the mid-19th century until WWI, the centralization process in the Ottoman empire and Qajar Iran brought Kurdistan under the direct rule of the central governments. The Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed on July 24, 1923, resulted […]

The following is a transcription of a speech presented by Thomas Schmidinger during a two day international conference on the centenary of the Lausanne Treaty held in Hasaka, Rojava (Northeastern Syria). The international conference was organized by The Rojava Center for Strategic Studies and held on the 7th-8th of July. *The following transcription entails editing […]

Turkey remains one of the most oppressive regimes towards its minorities, especially its Kurdish population. The Kurds make up over 18% of Turkey’s 85 million citizens, yet face systemic state oppression, violence, and injustices. Turkey has long been accused by international organizations and human rights groups of engaging in culturicide and linguicide against the Kurds, […]

Dengbêjî should not be viewed as an outmoded and dying artform, primitive and unwilling to carry itself across the treacherous road of modernization into contemporary society, but rather as the song of an oppressed people long denied a voice, a place and the right to their very existence. Dengbêjî is as Kurdish, as indigenous to its identity as the Zagros and Qandil mountains are integral to the Kurds.

Lack of International Recognition Hampers Reporting Effort In the autonomous Kurdish region of Syria, known as Rojava, a pressing dilemma has been brewing for the past decade. Over 500 Syrian Kurdish journalists, dedicated to reporting the truth amidst the chaos of the Syrian conflict, find themselves grappling with a significant obstacle – the lack of […]

Kurdish women Kolbers are some of the most invisible segment within wider Kurdish society. Their labor, suffering, injuries and deaths are rendered invisible in the greater scheme of nationalist struggle. Due to the extreme nature of their work, ‘Kolbers’ are typically portrayed as a group of men who cross the Kurdistan borders (Iran, Turkey, Iraq, […]

The progressive, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) this week announced its intention to begin trials of the estimated 2000 ‘third-country national’ male ISIS fighters it is currently holding in its detention centres, along with around 8000 Syrian and Iraqi combatants. The mooted trials are commonly represented as ‘unilateral’ – a loaded […]

“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 […]

On Monday (June 12), people in Rojava were astounded by a US Central Command press release revealing 22 US military personnel were injured in a helicopter “mishap” in southern Hasaka, part of the de facto Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)- also known as Rojava. With the incident repressed for 24 hours, and […]

“We can no longer keep these prisoners without an indictment or trial. These people must be held accountable for their crimes. They remain a danger not only to the region, but to the entire world. These are thousands of the most brutal ISIS fighters. We cannot keep them anymore. It is creating a security problem […]

Ismet Tastan is one of those rare Kurds whose tireless efforts for the Kurdish people deserves detailed attention and praise. I have known Ismet for well over a decade and can say with confidence that his selfless passion and unending love for the Kurdish cause served as one of my inspirations and my own political […]

Kurdistan remains a widely occupied and terrorized terrain. For decades various forms of colonial and imperial violence has been imposed on the Kurds, ranging from ethnic cleansing, genocides, chemical weapons, mass execution of fighting-aged males, bombardments, systemic environmental destruction including widespread destruction of thousands of villages, forced migration and violent assimilation policies and more. The […]

On Saturday the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) announced that it will commence trials of the thousands of ISIS militants it has held in detention since 2019. The Kurdish-led administration of northeast Syria (Rojava) had back in 2020 announced a similar trial with International Monitors led by the Swedish government but such […]

Back on April 24th and 25th of 2023, the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Middle East Centre held what became the largest Kurdish studies conference ever assembled. The inaugural event was held with the support of LSE’s Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) program based at the International Inequalities Institute, the […]

Challenges in Documenting the Historical Role of Kurdish Women The nature of the ‘Kurdish Question’ has ensured that Kurdish women have historically played a prominent role in the liberation of their people across the four parts of Greater Kurdistan. More recently, at least since 2001 there has been intense interest in the historical and modern […]

Any cursory google search of “Rojava” or “northern Syria” will likely leave you with a litany of articles, videos and photos consisting mostly of soldiers, war, and destruction. This one-sided media coverage of Rojava often fails to address the human side of the local society. Those who wish to take a deeper dive into Rojava […]

Revolutions can be made with guns, but they are preserved and maintained with pens, photographs, and video cameras. This is because the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy itself, and a prerequisite for a free society. Since Rojava is committed to that ideal, it is helpful to look back at a […]

A report recently released by the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) revealed that 120, 000 Yazidis (Êzidî) have fled the country since the genocidal campaign by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) perpetrated against the Yazidi enclave of Mount Shingal in August 2014. Many have chosen relocation in countries such as Germany, Sweden, […]

Sherko Bekas (Kurdish: Şêrko Bêkes‎) born on the 2nd of May 1940, was one of the most pre-eminent Kurdish poets of the 20th Century. Hailing from Sulaymaniyah in Bashur (Southern Kurdistan/northern Iraq) as the son of the Kurdish poet Fayak Bekas, Sherko was introduced to poetry and literature from an early age. He would go […]

A recent report by Hengaw, a Kurdish human rights organization documenting human rights violations by the Iranian regime, shows a concerning rise in executions of minorities such as Kurds, Baloch and Azeris by the government. The Iranian regime has historically relied on executions – often still held in public spaces in town and city squares […]