Afrin

I. Background Since 2011, cultural heritage in Syria has been under constant threat. Even though the civil war has raged on for more than a decade, there is still no end in sight. The involvement of various foreign actors has further complicated the country’s ongoing division between several rival factions. With around 5.2 million Syrians […]

In early 2018, when Turkey’s dictator Erdoğan announced his intention to attack and invade the Kurdish canton of Afrin (Efrîn), one of the three liberated areas of Rojava (north Syria), many Kurds in the diaspora knew that another period of intense activism was going to be required. Then, as the Turkish military began indiscriminately shelling […]

Not long ago, on the eve of battle against Turkey’s invading military, Kurdish fighters gathered around a smartphone, tarnished AK-47s slung back over their skinny shoulders. These men are not supposed to use phones, but they all have contraband Alcatels anyway, using them mostly to fill the long, dull interludes between combat by playing simulated […]

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 […]

Following natural disasters, wars, and other catastrophes, it has become almost commonplace for Kurdish journalists and activists to condemn the way their homeland is written out of the headlines. Consecutive deadly earthquakes in southeast Turkey (Northern Kurdistan) and north Syria (Rojava) have brought a similar outcry. As the death toll climbed above 50,000, the Kurds’ […]

On March 18, 2018, the Erdoğan regime in Turkey announced that the Turkish Armed Forces and their affiliated ‘Syrian National Amy’ (SNA) jihadist factions had fully occupied the Kurdish region of Afrin (Efrîn) after 58 days of encirclement and unrelenting attack from artillery and the air. Both being devastating military means of war that Afrin’s […]

In January 2018, Turkey’s military launched an unprovoked cross border operation against the Afrin (Efrîn) region of Rojava in northwest Syria. The military invasion was cynically named “Operation Olive Branch” (an Orwellian reference to somehow offering peace through war), which went on to cause massive infrastructural damage and civilian suffering to those in the city […]

In the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, a considerable change has occurred amongst many civilians in Turkish occupied northwest Syria regarding the public perception of the Kurds. Previously, many of these Syrians cynically adhered to the xenophobic discourse and propaganda spread by Ankara in order to continue to […]

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (with all of its relentless ramifications) and the Arab Spring in 2011, have had colossal impacts on Assyrians in the Middle East in general, and in Syria (Rojava) and Iraq (Kurdistan Region) in particular. These impacts have been magnified by the fact that Assyrians have continually fallen prey […]

The genocidal campaign perpetrated by fighters of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) against the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar in 2014 brought the ethno-religious Kurdish minority in Iraq and Syria into the spotlight. While Yazidis in Iraq are heavily concentrated in the Sheikhan district of Duhok and Sinjar, adherents of the faith in Syria have lived […]

After a decade of enmity, the end of 2022 saw a sudden move towards rapprochement between Syria and Turkey. For Turkish President Erdogan, normalization with Syria serves three important goals for his leadership, particularly with difficult elections coming up in 2023. These are the eventual withdrawal of Turkish troops from their increasingly unpopular entanglement in […]