Listen here to our daily update:
Hello friends, sisters and comrades,
I wanted to begin this daily update message talking about Kobani.
Kobani is still underseige. 70 places, including schools, mosques, kindergartens, halls, and empty shops, have opened up to house the displaced. Families have opened their homes, with each family housings 4 to 5 familys. ANHA estimates the number of people affected by this seige to 600,000. Many have fled to the city from Raqqa and Tabqa, the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods as well as the attacked surrounding countryside of the city.
Fuel, infant milk, and medicin have run out in Kobani. According to the Co-Chair of the Social Affairs Authority all commercial shops have run out of food. Villagers and farmers that had to flee are no longer able to collect and share their harvest. The most critical issue is infant milk. A humanitarian corridor needs to be opened immediately!
Today is the global support for Rojava day. In most cities in Rojava huge marches and demonstration took place, and we saw photos of protests around the world as well. In Qamislo pictures of Martyrs were held up high in the front, reminding us of the sacrifices that were given in the struggle for a free life.
Once again, a part of the caravan defending Rojava and humanity is being harassed and arrested by the Turkish state in the Riha (Urfa) region. They are still imprisoned. Our thoughts are with our friends and we demand their immediate release. The arrests violate human rights and dignity.
This once again shows the motives of the Turkish state, that is not interested in a peaceful solution to the Kurdish Question and a peaceful co-existence of the peoples in the Middle East. It’s a continuation of their attempted annihilation and silencing of the Kurds and their allies.
The same picture of human rights violations emerges when we look at the protests in Bakur, against the massacres in Rojava. There were mass arrests, including youth under the age of 18, in the Northern Kurdish province of Mardin. The prisoners were forced to kiss the Turkish flag, cold water was poured over their bodies before they were forced to remain outside in the cold. People have had broken bones and were tourtured to get their passwords. Human rights groups are documenting the abuses.
The conditions of detention and the methods of torture used are reminiscent of the conditions in Turkish prisons in 1982, where a large resistance movement arose in the prisons. There is a film we recommend to watch, it’s called 14 July. It shows the protests of 1982 and the prisoners deeply rooted conviction of a free life.
What will happen now in Rojava, with the new integration deal completely depends on our level of resistance and international solidarity. Nothing is put in stone after some signatures were put on paper. We must continue to protect the achievements of the women’s revolution. To defend Rojava is not just to protect the land in a military sense, but to protect what Rojava has come to mean to so many of us: a life where women can be free.
We must insist, with the same determination that the YPJ fight with, that women’s autonomous self-defence, in the form of YPJ is nessessary, since the Women’s Protection Units YPJ, were not mentioned in the agreement at all.
We must insist on the co-chair system, so that no one person is in a position of power, but that women are always an equal part of decision making positions.
We must insist that women can continue their hard fought for positions in the civil institution.
We already see the Arab majority women’s organisation Zenobia under huge attack, with their future in question, since it’s members were harshly targeted after the STG’s take-over of Raqqa and Tabqa. We must insist that the women’s movements continue with the same fierceness and strength as ever.
Women’s gains have always been won through struggle, through insistence. We need this spirit now more than ever.
Women defend Rojava. It is not just the name of a campaign, but the declaration from every woman who says these words, that the Rojava revolution is for all women, and we as women will defend it. It is a promise.
Women defend Rojava.
