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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 […]

Prelude Until the 1800s Kurds lived in autonomous principalities on the fringes of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, the contiguous region providing a buffer between the two fierce rivals. After the spread of nationalism and World War I, in 1920, the defeated Ottoman Empire and victorious allies signed the Treaty of Sevres, which outlined a […]

In various cultures and mythologies around the world, nature in its multifaceted forms, including trees, rivers, or mountains, are considered sacred and believed to embody deities, spirits, or even the souls of ancestors. Such beliefs are also found in Kurdish culture and mythology, which attribute spiritual or supernatural qualities to all natural objects, including stones, […]

The youth in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) remain one of the most marginalized groups within society; their voices muted, barely able to rise above a whisper among the ruckus and clamor of the older conservative generation whose views on tradition, culture, religion and politics continue to suffocate the young and the brave. Born […]

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 […]

Elections for the Parliament of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Southern Kurdistan (north Iraq) are currently scheduled for November 18, 2023, more than a year after they were originally planned for October 1, 2022. However, the prospect for either another delay or a deeply flawed election both remain possible due to continued tensions between […]

Many of us are familiar with the dictum, attributed to Antonio Gramsci, that socialists should be possessed by “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In its original context, a prison letter written to an anarchist comrade whom he accuses of simplistically claiming petty victories, the militant Italian intellectual goes on to opine how: […]

On February 16th, 2023,  the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a press release expressing “grave concern” about reports that the male children of ISIS fighters, some as young as 12, had recently been removed from the Roj Camp in Rojava (northeast Syria), 13 kms from Derik. In the wake […]

Historically, research in Kurdistan and about the Kurds entailed outsiders who have presented Kurdish identity and history to fit within the margins of their Eurocentric worldview and interests. The literature that emerged including travelogues, reports, diaries, novels, and historical writings emerged from the perspective of legitimizing Western imperial objectives and justifying its cultural hegemony, while […]

“I wanted everyone to have an education in their mother tongue. I wanted them to be able to learn in Kurdish; oppressed people like Kurds are not allowed to study in their mother tongue. For all those reasons and because of all the projects I began, they [Turkey] wanted to put me in prison for […]

The Kurdish movement, along with its friends, supporters and fellow travelers, is experiencing a strange and novel sensation – the uncanny sense that a Presidential election might bring about political change worth the name. Albeit that Turkey’s torn socio-economic fabric will not be remade overnight, and the opportunism of opposition candidate Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu’s appeals to […]

The book ‘Kurdish Culture and Identity’ edited by Philip Kreyenbroek and Christine Allison and published in 1996, is an important work in the repository of works written about Kurdish culture, history, and identity. It arose from the milieu of the 1990s, which proved to be one of the most important and productive periods in the […]

In the midst of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom) protests last autumn, which were triggered by the police murder of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, reports emerged of poisonings of schoolgirls and university students throughout wider Iran and Eastern Kurdistan (northwest Iran). In November 2022, students in Qom and Isfahan reported […]

Though not confirmed yet, Turkey’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, announced on Friday (April 28), that the quadripartite meeting involving foreign affairs ministers of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Moscow may take place in early May. Notably, his country is in the throes of holding parliamentary and presidential elections that could end the two decade-long rule […]

Historical Significance Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14th are historic. They come 100 years after Kurdish leaders were betrayed after they supported Kemal Ataturk to establish the nation state of Turkey because they trusted he would fulfil his promise of giving Kurds’ autonomy in the newly created nation. General Ihsan Nuri Pasha was […]

“The smuggling has its roots in the clumsiness of rulers who for hundreds of years have taken the thousand-mile Zagros range as the boundary between Arabia and Persia, but ignored how Kurds live on both sides.”  — Alex Perry, Outside Magazine Kolber is a Kurdish compound word composed of two words: “kol + ber,” which […]

In Kurdish religions and mythology a cosmological figure, Ana, is the goddess of water and rain.[1] Associated with fertility, wisdom, and healing, she looks after the well-being of women, promoting fertility and safe childbirth. Flowing down from the mountain springs to lakes, her life-giving waters ensure the survival of the holy creation. In the Kurdish […]

Every year, Kurdish journalists and people across the four regions of Greater Kurdistan celebrate Kurdish Journalism Day on the 22nd of April to commemorate the publication of the first Kurdish newspaper, ‘Kurdistan’. Such celebrations are important, because one of the major forms of repression that the Kurds have experienced across Kurdistan has involved suppression of language […]

We live in a technological age, in which computer chips are made out of rare minerals, and in which AI (Artificial Intelligence) is advancing at breakneck speed. State and transnational apparatuses of surveillance and marketing render the dream of decentralized workers’ control and people power perhaps hopelessly nostalgic, reminiscent of the aspirations of a bygone […]

As the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is drawing to a close, and as Muslims are preparing to break the fast and celebrate Eid al-Fitr, followers of a much smaller, yet far more ancient faith are also celebrating a new year, popularly called “Red Wednesday” too. This is a rare coincidence that fundamentally represents the […]

The current plight of the Kurds in Northern Kurdistan (southeast Turkey) has evolved through decades of state engineering and racist policies, which have resulted in the current crises under the Turkish state. A historical analysis demonstrates that the construction of Turkey was established precisely for the purpose of controlling, repressing, and silencing minorities such as […]