Rojava

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In recent months, a number of devastating earthquakes have hit the four regions of Greater Kurdistan. From the wreckage of the massive February 6th earthquakes that ran across Bakur (Northern Kurdistan) and Rojava (Western Kurdistan), to smaller scale tremors reverberating across Bashur (Southern Kurdistan), to different medium scale earthquakes in Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan). Kurdistan is […]

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 […]

“Many different alternative movements around the world simply refused to stop imagining that another world is possible: Öcalan and the Kurdish freedom movement belong to this category.” — Havin Guneser Throughout human history there has been a clash between two societal paradigms. The dominant one is heteronomy – a condition in which society does not recognize […]

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 […]

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 […]

On March 1, 2003, Turkey’s Grand National Assembly (TBMM) failed to pass a motion to allow the participation of Turkish armed forces in the US-led invasion of Iraq, and concurrently give assent for foreign troops to be deployed on Turkish soil to serve that end. That failure, or rather democratic rejection, has ever since marked […]

This two part article was originally written in the Arabic section of The Kurdish Center for Studies and has been translated to English for wider viewing. Part I can be read → here Syria, a fledgling successor state to the Ottoman Empire, could not withstand early Turkish aspirations, had it not been for the French […]

What happens when the most dangerous earthquake is Erdoğan himself? In light of the upcoming June elections in Turkey, nothing has highlighted the stark nature of Turkish ultra-nationalism and racism than the treatment of the Kurdish affected regions following the 7.8 Richter scale earthquake that hit early on the morning of February 6th. At the […]

Since the revolt of Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri in 1880, the Kurdish people have been struggling to achieve a form of political liberty based explicitly on the notion of Kurdish national unity.[1] Despite this continuous struggle, the Kurds are still dominated. This leads to an important question: why have the Kurds failed to achieve political […]

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 […]

The year 2022 saw the rise of the plight and situation of the Kurds to international attention. From South Kurdistan (Northern Iraq, Basur) being repeatedly bombed and subject to drone strikes both from Turkey and Iran, to Northern Syria (Rojava) subjected to chemical weapons use, airstrikes and drone attacks and the Kurds in Iran (Rojhilat) […]

The battle for Kobane was a turning point for ISIS, its first big defeat. It marked as well the beginning of the collaboration between Rojava’s revolutionary forces and the US military in the war against ISIS. The YPG and YPJ cum SDF provided the crucial boots on the ground to stop ISIS and push them […]

It has been broadly argued that one of the prominent and distinctive features of the recent revolutionary movement in Iran is the solidarity and unity of all Iranian peoples despite ethnic, religious, linguistic, and even gender differences under the all-encompassing umbrella of Jin Jiyan Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom). However, the recent developments of this revolutionary […]

The Kurdish Center for Studies (KCS) recently conducted an interview with Dr. Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Lecturer in Political Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In the interview, Miley shares his expertise on defining “nation” and “nationalism” and elaborates on Abdullah Öcalan’s democratic nation and his reinterpretation of the concept of […]