Listen here to the daily update:
Dear friends, allies, and sisters,
It is Thursday, February 12th, and we send you greetings from Rojava.
Aid from Bakûr arrives in Kobanê
There are small glimmers of hope for the people of Kobanê. After the power supply was restored, a convoy of aid supplies from the Kurdish Red Crescent in Northern Kurdistan finally arrived in Kobanê yesterday, following a long delay by the Turkish state. It is a great success that this transport was made possible. Nevertheless, even several truckloads of aid can hardly improve the situation for the people of Kobanê. Hundreds of thousands of people have now been living under siege by the Syrian and Turkish governments for over three weeks. Food and medicine are scarce.
Continued pressure is needed to accelerate these deliberately delayed processes and open a corridor to the Cizîre Canton. The Syrian Transitional Government must finally take action and follow through on the agreements. To date, no measures have been taken to end the siege.
Siege as a War Strategy
News of shortages is also coming from Sweida. All bakeries are currently closed because they have run out of flour. An aid convoy carrying 400 tons of flour is being held up at one of the government checkpoints. For weeks, supplies to the Druze-held areas have been restricted. Now the main road to Damascus is blocked. People are afraid and angry, according to reports. The fact that the Syrian government is using the hunger of the civilian population as leverage in Sweida, as in Kobanê, violates international law and must be condemned and stopped accordingly. It is no surprise that the international community is doing nothing in the face of this.
Further Withdrawal of the International Coalition
While armed clashes in Raqqa and on the west coast continue to claim lives, the International Anti-ISIS Coalition is withdrawing from one of its bases, readily ceding the field to HTS.
Termination of Alawite Teachers
Alawite teachers have announced that the Ministry of Education in Damascus informed them via WhatsApp that their employment contracts were being terminated. Education is the heart of a society. Through education, knowledge, awareness, values, and culture are passed on. It is a common practice of oppressive states, still known here from the Ba’ath regime, to turn schools into places of assimilation. Discussions about the future of the education system are also on the agenda here in Rojava. The government wants to restrict Kurdish to a two-hour elective subject once a week. No one here will accept that.
What is Israel actually doing?
We are constantly seeing news of further movements by the Israeli military in southern Syria. Since HTS seized power, Israel has expanded its occupation of the Golan Heights and is advancing further with heavy weapons in the Quneitra region. Civilians are being attacked and historical sites destroyed. These clear violations of international law have been condemned internationally, but have received little media attention. The Syrian government is also not taking action against these attacks. Why? Officially, because al-Shaara doesn’t want to burden his country with another war. This seems odd, considering what he has been doing in recent weeks. More likely, it’s related to the agreements reached between Syria and Israel in Paris on January 5th. Al-Shaara and HTS were deliberately supported by imperialist powers like Great Britain, France, and the USA in seizing power in Syria to gain further leverage for pursuing Western interests in the Middle East. This includes subordinating themselves to the State of Israel, which appears to have been working for some time on creating the so-called “David’s Corridor.” This is intended to be a broad swath stretching from Gaza across the Golan Heights, through southern Syria, and up into Kurdistan.
Today, Israel conducted a large-scale military exercise, which must also be interpreted as a signal. This followed a meeting between Trump and Netanyahu concerning Iran. Israel is also threatening Gaza with another ground invasion after a four-month ceasefire.
This planned chaos, being unleashed with strategic precision upon the people and landscape of the Middle East, must be understood in its grand scale as one of the centers of World War III, as a stage for imperialist, patriarchal forces – while simultaneously not forgetting its very concrete implications on the ground. And the resistance against it.
Fatima
Therefore, I would like to conclude today’s message with a message from Fatima Haj Mahmoud. Fatima is a young woman from the Kobanê region. As the war intensified, her family brought her back from the city where she was studying law for the first year to their village so they could be together. On the night of January 25th, her village was attacked by militias affiliated with the Syrian Transitional Government. Simple houses were shelled with heavy weapons. When Fatima awoke, she was already trapped under a heavy building block. It took until the next morning to free her from the rubble. The five other family members who were in the house with her did not survive the attack. Their legs had to be amputated. In an interview, the young woman can be seen sitting upright in her wheelchair. She recounts the brutal attack she survived and knows that this attack is one of a long series of attacks repeatedly perpetrated against the Kurdish people throughout history. She emphasizes that the Kurds are strong and resist all these attacks with their willpower. Seeing her back at the university in Kobanê, where she intends to continue and complete her studies, one sees this willpower and resilience in her eyes and her smile. This strength can transform even such an unimaginably terrible experience into determination.
Stories like this unfold every day in this chaos, in this war for the future of life here and around the world. As Jineolojî makes it its method, we must always connect the small with the large, see the specific within the universal.
And with that, we come to an end for today. We wish you strength and willpower, and we’ll talk again tomorrow!
