On 2nd November a global day of resistance for Rojava brought thousands of people out onto the streets in dozens of cities around the world.

For the people of Northern Syria, currently resisting an invasion by the Turkish army and its jihadist proxies, the joy and hope that these demonstrations brought is amongst the greatest gifts one could hope for. It reminds us that we are not alone against the Salafist hordes that the Turkish state is sending.

We salute all the actions and demonstrations happening in solidarity with Rojava and send our warmest greeting to those who are supporting the campaigns of #RiseUp4Rojava and #WomenDefendRjava. The resistance continues, as does the revolution, and today more than ever we need solidarity and support.

PLEASE HELP.. donate TO Kurdish Red Crescent / Heyva Sor A Kurd

HERE https://www.heyvasor.com/en/alikari/

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Global call to defend the Rojava Revolution! from Internationalist Commune on Vimeo.

On 2nd November a global day of resistance for Rojava brought thousands of people out onto the streets in dozens of cities around the world.

For the people of Northern Syria, currently resisting an invasion by the Turkish army and its jihadist proxies, the joy and hope that these demonstrations brought is amongst the greatest gifts one could hope for. It reminds us that we are not alone against the Salafist hordes that the Turkish state is sending. We salute all the actions and demonstrations happening in solidarity with Rojava and send our warmest greeting to those who are supporting the campaigns of #RiseUp4Rojava and #WomenDefendRjava. The resistance continues, as does the revolution, and today more than ever we need solidarity and support.

When you make a revolution against patriarchy, the nation-state and capitalism, of course you can’t rely on other states to support you. We use to say that the Kurds have ‘no friends but the mountains’, but on 2nd November we saw this was not true. The international solidarity that Rojava is witnessing is inspirational; it inspires us as internationalists in Rojava to remain steadfast on the barricades of this revolution and to commit to our many different works here, because we know that all our many struggles are entwined. Today the struggle is Rojava, tomorrow it could be anywhere else, and by defending Rojava we are defending not only the people and the revolution here, but also the hope that another world is possible.

Internationalism is an essential dimension in the history of revolutionary movements, and Rojava is today writing an important chapter. From the First International Association of Workers to the Tri-Continental Conference, from the 50,000 of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to fight fascism in 1936, to the 500,000 Cuban revolutionaries who travelled to Africa to support decolonisation struggles, from the solidarity with the resistance in Vietnam to the antiglobalisation movements, from the revolutionary inter-communalism of the Black Panthers to the solidarity with Palestinian revolutionary resistance. Rojava is today heritage of this history of internationalism, and we are called to play our role in it.

Of course there are other important struggles happening all around the world. We see the uprisings in South America, with big mobilisations happening in Chile, the new ‘caracoles’ declared by the EZLN in Chiapas, and the resistance in Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. We see the Catalan people resisting against the attacks of the Spanish state. We see the massive uprisings happening in Middle East, such as in Lebanon or Iraq, in Sudan and Egypt, and other peoples in Africa looking for alternatives to the nation-state model that colonial powers imposed on them. We see the resistance movements of India, Philippines, Indonesia, and we stand with all revolutionaries who fight to bring all oppression to an end.

Internationalism in the twenty-first century has a lot of colours, but for sure the colour of the woman is the one that shines brightest. Patriarchy is the foundation upon which all social oppression is built, and the liberation from the mentality of dominant male must always be in the forefront of any revolutionary struggle. The defence of nature, so exploited and abused by the industrial system, has to be also in the first line, facing the ecological crisis that capitalism created. Democracy is our flag, but not the parliamentary democracy that Western powers tried to impose to the rest of the World. We raise the flag of the commune, the democracy of local councils and popular assemblies.

For all of this, we call to defend this revolution, and to make it a cradle for a global democratic modernity.

Global call to defend the Rojava Revolution! from Internationalist Commune on Vimeo

When you make a revolution against patriarchy, the nation-state and capitalism, of course you can’t rely on other states to support you. We use to say that the Kurds have ‘no friends but the mountains’, but on 2nd November we saw this was not true. The international solidarity that Rojava is witnessing is inspirational; it inspires us as internationalists in Rojava to remain steadfast on the barricades of this revolution and to commit to our many different works here, because we know that all our many struggles are entwined. Today the struggle is Rojava, tomorrow it could be anywhere else, and by defending Rojava we are defending not only the people and the revolution here, but also the hope that another world is possible. 

Internationalism is an essential dimension in the history of revolutionary movements, and Rojava is today writing an important chapter. From the First International Association of Workers to the Tri-Continental Conference, from the 50,000 of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to fight fascism in 1936, to the 500,000 Cuban revolutionaries who travelled to Africa to support decolonisation struggles, from the solidarity with the resistance in Vietnam to the antiglobalisation movements, from the revolutionary inter-communalism of the Black Panthers to the solidarity with Palestinian revolutionary resistance.

Rojava is today heritage of this history of internationalism, and we are called to play our role in it.

Of course there are other important struggles happening all around the world. We see the uprisings in South America, with big mobilisations happening in Chile, the new ‘caracoles’ declared by the EZLN in Chiapas, and the resistance in Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. We see the Catalan people resisting against the attacks of the Spanish state. We see the massive uprisings happening in Middle East, such as in Lebanon or Iraq, in Sudan and Egypt, and other peoples in Africa looking for alternatives to the nation-state model that colonial powers imposed on them. We see the resistance movements of India, Philippines, Indonesia, and we stand with all revolutionaries who fight to bring all oppression to an end.

Internationalism in the twenty-first century has a lot of colours, but for sure the colour of the woman is the one that shines brightest. Patriarchy is the foundation upon which all social oppression is built, and the liberation from the mentality of dominant male must always be in the forefront of any revolutionary struggle. The defence of nature, so exploited and abused by the industrial system, has to be also in the first line, facing the ecological crisis that capitalism created. Democracy is our flag, but not the parliamentary democracy that Western powers tried to impose to the rest of the World. We raise the flag of the commune, the democracy of local councils and popular assemblies.

For all of this, we call to defend this revolution, and to make it a cradle for a global democratic modernity.

Til Temir: Front line – A letter from an internationalist friend

Til Temir: Front line – A letter from an internationalist friend

A combatjet passes in low flight over the city of Til Temir, making the windows of the houses vibrate, where Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians coexist in this arid city located today few kilometers of the front. When the blazing sound of the engine passes, the crying of a baby is the first thing to break the silence. We did not feel any explosion, it seems that this flight only wanted to frighten the population. Now heads of neighbors pop out from the windows to see that everyone is good.

-Perhaps now that their soldiers have arrived, their planes are arriving as well.

-Surely it’s Russian, Russian planes have to fly lower than the others to see what happens!

-No, it must be American! Now that the Americans are leaving, so are their planes.

And they laugh. They laugh to scare the fear. The fear they have is that the next plane won’t pass by, that it will drop one of the bombs we’ve heard exploding on the outskirts of the city for days now. That’s why nobody mentions that the plane in question is surely a Turkish F-16, so as not to spread fear among the few people who are still left in this neighborhood. Many neighbors marched days ago to Haseke, where a couple of weeks ago they have started to build a new refugee camp to receive people displaced by this new war. A new war that is confused with the previous one.

Five years ago Til Temir experienced the war against the Islamic state on the front line, especially the Christian villages nearby where the Salafists showed their cruelest face, mutilating and decapitating those who captured alive to the cry of “infidels” and “Allah is the greatest”. They are the same cries that we hear today in the videos that come from the front and that circulate between Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages, where groups of armed men trained by the Turkish state celebrate how the Kurdish politician Hevrîn Xelef, is executed or how they capture the fighter of the YPJ Çiçek Kobane.

When we arrived in Til Temir in mid-October, seeking to open a humanitarian corridor to the then besieged city of Serekaniye, Til Temir’s seven schools were already filled with elderly people, mothers and children fleeing Turkish bombs. Since then the front has continued to inexorably approach the city, and more and more towns and villages have to be evacuated. Yesterday the father of the host family, a teacher in one of the schools that had to stop classes to accommodate refugees, showed me a video of a small village from which a large column of smoke was rising.

“This is my village. It was bombarded by a Turkish plane. The hevals (Kurdish word for “friends”, referring to the fighters of the YPG/YPJ) have been alone defending the village for three days, everyone had to flee because of the bombs.

A strange front

Following the withdrawal of United States troops in early October, the agreement between the Self-Administration of North-East Syria and the government forces of the Syrian State has created a strange situation. The regular forces of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) are deployed jointly with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to deal with the Turkish occupation.

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For the first time in more than seven years, government soldiers have set foot in the territory where the Kurds, along with Assyrians, Arabs and other ethnic groups of northern Syria, have implemented the self-government project inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, known as the proposal for democratic confederalism.

A little less than a week ago the first reinforcements of the SAA arrived in Til Temir. We knew this because the morning they entered the city, they spent about twenty minutes circling and firing into the air waving the Syrian flag from old trucks, full of young and badly armed soldiers, before heading for the front. They hoped that this flag would protect them from Turkish mortars and fighter planes, but it did not. From the Legerîn Ciya hospital (an internationalist doctor who came from Argentina to Rojava and who died just over a year ago) we could see how the same afternoon, the improvised operating theatres were filled with Bashar Al-Assad soldiers wounded by the bombings and mortars of Erdogan’s soldiers (and others of jihadists).

Yesterday we saw once again American helicopters flying over the city, which indicates that they were moving troops again. After announcing their withdrawal in early October, last week, Donald Trump explained that they were returning to Syria to “protect the oil”.

Neighbors explained to us that their convoy of armored vehicles was returning to Qamislo after pro-turk Islamists attacked them as they passed through Ain Issa in the direction of Kobane. In the military base they had there, today the Russian flag is flying, and a few days ago Russian soldiers have been patrolling together with the Turkish army along the border between the cities of Serekaniye and Amude. A few kilometres further, between Qamislo and Derik, it is American soldiers who patrol.

This morning SAA reinforcements arrived again, this time with old Russian tanks and a few mortars and other heavy weapons. They will need them. The day before yesterday, when we went to visit the front, we saw the conditions in which they were deployed in the different villages where the SDF still maintain the defense of the territory. After the withdrawal of the SDF from the city of Serekaniye on October 12, the front has moved to the semi-desert plains that separate the scarce 40 kilometers between Til Temir and Serekaniye, where the Islamists advance thanks to the air support of Turkish planes and combat drones.

In a war in these conditions, it is sometimes difficult to know who is a friend and who is an enemy. At the front we are usually guided by the premise that if he doesn’t shoot you, he is a friend. The great hospitality of the Middle East, where everyone you meet greets you with vocation and invites you to sit down and have tea, can lead you to live strange situations. The most recent, looking for a translator to explain to the captain of a team of SAA mortars that we did not want sugar in the tea he offered us, while a group of soldiers unloaded the cannons behind the SDF lines while they asked us, honestly surprised, how it is possible that we could speak Kurdish and not Arabic.

https://twitter.com/YpgInt/status/1086945627228045312

Internationalism and Revolution

Rojava’s revolution has inspired social movements all over the world, highlighting without doubt the libertarian, feminist and ecological character that Kurdish socialism promotes. Solidarity committees translate, organize demonstrations and denounce the Turkish occupation to different countries, coordinating with the extensive Kurdish diaspora that has dispersed in recent decades because of repeated wars that have threatened their survival. In the framework of the campaign #RiseUp4Rojava, last Saturday, November 2, we saw more than a hundred demonstrations in dozens of countries around the world.

We are also quite a few internationalists who are currently working on the ground, especially in communication and health care, covering the fronts that resist the invasion. We said that war sometimes creates strange companies, and I think it is an adequate description when we see the two main international teams that are currently assisting the wounded on the front of Til Temir in coordination with Heyva Sor (the Kurdish Red Crescent). On the one hand, a group of anarchists from different countries who have coincided in Rojava and who have been working for some time as a combat medical team. On the other hand, a group of American and Burmese Christians who have been working for more than two decades as combat medical teams in different conflicts.

In fact, one of the international martyrs that this Turkish offensive has claimed so far, belongs to this team. Yesterday one of the ambulances at the rear of the front was hit by a projectile that wounded two people and put an end to the life of a third. His name is Zao Sang, born Thailand, who lost his life shortly after the impact caused by the serious injuries.

Also the German Konstantin G. (Andok), fighter of the international brigade of the YPG, was killed by the Turkish bombs in a convoy headed to Serekaniye. And today we had to add a third name, which is that the commander of the international battalion for freedom Ozge Aydin (Ceren), a Turkish national, died from the wounds that led to her coma last week.

Their names lengthen the list of the hundreds of combatants and civilians who have been killed in this Turkish offensive.

https://twitter.com/EndiZentarmi/status/1196539495744708608

To speak of death and war can easily frighten the western reader, accommodated in the first world where wars always take place away from home. The revolution of 1936, when tens of thousands of international brigadists came to support the war against fascism during the second Spanish Republic, is a long way off. A third of those who came could never return home again, but their actions meant an important chapter in the history of revolutionary internationalism.

Today in Rojava we are a handful of Catalans who are here, together with Castilians and Galicians. Also Basques, Aragonese, Andalusians and Portuguese have passed through here, inspired by the revolutionary project of Rojava, living and discussing the contradictions that this society generates, debating on how to develop an Iberian confederal project. Now that the situation in Catalonia calls into question the model of the Spanish nation-state, it is more than ever necessary to reflect together on what future we want to build.

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In fact, today we have published a global appeal together with other internationalists to come to support the resistance of Rojava, to understand and learn what it means to build (and defend) a revolution.

The number of internationalists who have come to put their grain of sand to Rojava is difficult to calculate, but it is far from the 50,000 brigadists who more than 80 years ago answered the call to confront fascism when we needed it most. No doubt this should make us reflect if we are really ready to carry out a revolutionary process or if it is just a romantic imaginary that we explain while we live our privileged lives. Revolution is not a road of roses, but no one has ever said it was easy. However, the alternative is to allow patriarchy and capitalism to continue to lead our lives, and for me and the many other comrades who are here, this is no longer an option.

Syria: Damning evidence of war crimes and other violations by Turkish Forces .. Amnesty.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/10/syria-damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-and-other-violations-by-turkish-forces-and-their-allies/Oct 18, 2019Turkish military forces and a coalition of Turkey-backed Syrian armed groups have displayed a shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violationsandwarcrimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians, during the offensive into northeast Syria, said Amnesty International today.