Just another day in the main hall of the Qamishli campus. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria, Sep 27 2022 (IPS)

There is a main hall as well as workshops, laboratories and, of course, a cafeteria, where the half-hour break flies by amid card games and laughs. It could well be any university if it wasn’t for those men armed with assault rifles at the entrance.

This is the campus of University of Rojava in Qamishli (700 kilometres northeast of Damascus), an institution that opened its doors in October 2016, in the midst of a war that still rages on.

The Kurdish minority in Syria coexists with Arabs and Syriacs in the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). It's in this corner of Syria, which shares borders with both Turkey and Iraq, where such a network of universities has been built. It now rivals the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic government

“Lessons in the Kurdish language are one of our hallmarks,” Rohan Mistefa, the former dean, tells IPS from an office on the second floor. Other than the language of instruction, significant differences from other Syrian universities are also visible in the curriculum.

“We got rid of subjects such as Ideology and History of the Baath Party (in power in Damascus since 1963) and replaced it with `Democratic Culture,'” explains this Kurdish woman in her mid-forties. The creation of a Department of Science for Women (Jineoloij, in Kurdish), she adds, has been another milestone.

The University of Rojava hosts around 2,000 students on three campuses. There are, however, two other active universities in Syria’s northeast: Kobani, working since 2017, and Al- Sharq in Raqqa. The latter has been operating since last year in a city that was once the capital of the Islamic State in Syria.

“Unlike the universities of Kobani and Rojava, in Raqqa they study in Arabic because the majority of citizens there are Arabs,” says Mistefa, who is today co-responsible for coordinating between the three institutions.

Mustefa has been closely linked to the institution since its inception. She helped to found the first Kurdish university in Syria in her native district of Afrin in 2015. That pioneering initiative had to close its doors in 2018: territorially disconnected from the rest of the Kurdish Syrian territories, Afrin was taken over by Ankara-backed Islamist militias. It remains under occupation to this day.

“Many people ask us why we open schools and universities in the middle of the war. I always tell them that ours is a culture of building, and not that of destroying our neighbours and their allies”, says the Kurdish woman.

Ideologues and martyrs of the Kurdish cause are also present on the walls of the University of Rojava. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The Kurds call “Rojava” (“west”) their native land in northeast Syria. In the wake of the so-called “Arab spring” uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, Kurds opted for what was then known as the “third way”: neither with the government nor with the opposition.

Twelve years on, the Kurdish minority in Syria coexists with Arabs and Syriacs in the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). It’s in this corner of Syria, which shares borders with both Turkey and Iraq, where such a network of universities has been built. It now rivals the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic government.

A “titanic task”

After the opening of the first Kurdish-language schools in the history of Syria, the University of Rojava is one more step forward in a revolution that has placed education among its main values.

It consists of nine faculties that offer free academic training in various Engineering branches, as well as Medicine, Law, Educational Sciences, Administration and Finance, Journalism and, of course, Kurdish Philology.

“I chose Philology because I love writing poems in Kurdish; I am very much into folklore, literature… everything that has to do with our culture,” Tolen Kenjo, a second-year student from the neighbouring city of Hasaka tells IPS.

The 19-year old still remembers being punished at school whenever she would utter a word in her mother tongue. For more than four decades, the ban on the Kurdish language in Syria was just another chapter within an ambitious assimilation plan that also included the displacement of the country’s Kurdish population and even the deprivation of citizenship of tens of thousands of them.

The cafeteria during the half-hour break. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Today, the university’s walls are covered with posters: climate maps, the photosynthesis cycle, quotes from the Russian classics. For the first time in Syria, all are in the Kurdish language. The corridors get crammed with students during the breaks between classes, often amid the laughter that comes from a group of students playing volleyball in the courtyard.

In the Department of English Language and Translation, we find Jihan Ayo, a Kurdish woman who has been teaching here for more than three years. Ayo is one of the more than 200,000 displaced (UN figures) who arrived from Serekaniye in 2019, when the Kurdish district was invaded by Islamist militias under Ankara´s wing.

“Turkey’s attacks or those by cells of the Islamic State are still a common currency here,” Ayo tells IPS. When it comes to lessons, she points to a “titanic task.”

Work is still underway to translate teaching materials into Kurdish — to train not only students but also those who will become their teachers. Among other things, Ayo remembers those “very tough” 18 months during which the pandemic forced lessons to be suspended.

“We tried to cope with things online; we got help from volunteer teachers from practically all over the world, but, of course, not everyone here has the means to connect to the Internet…”

She also faces a fight to gain the trust of many local citizens, towards an educational network that has no recognition outside this corner of Syria. Although the Kurdish administration administers the region, the “official” schools -those ran by Damascus- continue to function and, of course, they stick to the pre-war curriculum.

Teaching in the middle of a war has been one of the challenges faced by the Syrian Kurds. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Recognition

In a comprehensive report published in September 2022 on the university system in northeast Syria, Rojava researchers Information Center (an independent press organization) stress the importance of international recognition that can make the institution more attractive to students.

“While the quality of the education received at these universities in itself is comparable to other institutions’ in the region, the lack of recognition abroad may make it impossible for the students to continue their studies outside of Syria, find employment abroad, or even have their technical knowledge recognized by companies and institutions not tied to the AANES,” the report warns.

It also claimks that the University of Rojava maintains cooperation agreements with at least eight foreign universities, including Washington State University (U.S.), Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and the University of Parma (Italy)..

It´s just a ten-minute walk from the campus to the headquarters of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant political party among Kurds in Syria. From his office, PYD co-chairman Salih Muslim wanted to highlight the role of universities as “providers of necessary cadres to build and develop the places they belong to and come from.”

“Our universities are ready to cooperate and exchange experiences with all the universities and international institutions to gain more experience and they are welcome to do so,” Muslim told IPS.

Despite the lack of international recognition, academic life goes on in this corner of Syria. Noreldin Hassan arrived from Afrin after the 2018 invasion and today is about to fulfil his dream of graduating in Journalism. The 27-year-old tells IPS that his university is “working in the right direction” to achieve international recognition. However, he has chosen not to wait for a degree to begin his career, and he has been working as a reporter for eight years already .

“Getting a diploma is important, but, at the end of the day, journalists learn by sheer practice while looking for stories and covering those,” stresses the young man.

The last story he covered? One about those women forced to marry mercenaries on a Turkish payroll. The story he´d like to cover the most? No surprises here:

“The day when the Kurds of Afrin can finally go back home.”

By Johan Galtung
OSLO, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

Baher Kamal, in … And All of a Sudden Syria!: “The “big five,” the United Nations veto powers, have just agreed United Nations Resolution 2254 of 18-12-2015, time to end the Syrian five-year long human tragedy; they waited until 300,000 innocent civilians were killed and 4.5 million humans lost as refugees and homeless at home, hundreds of field testing of state-of-the-art drones made, and daily U.S., British, French and Russian bombing carried out.” No Chinese bombing.

Johan Galtung

One term in the resolution, road map, already spells failure. There is another reason: missing issues. But something can be done. Roads twist, turn and may be far from straight. Traveling a road is a linear, one step or mile-stone after another, process, by the map. The West loves linearity; as causal chains, (falling dominoes,) from a root cause; as deductive chains from axioms; as ranks from high to low.

However, is that not how the world is, moving in time, causes-effects, axioms-consequences, rank, power, over others? Are roads not rather useful? They are. Is there an alternative to a road map? There is.

One step after the other in time is diachronic. An alternative would be synchronic; at the same time. Let us call it a cake map.

A cake is served, cut in slices, each party takes a slice, waits till all are served to start together. By the road map, first come first served first to eat. Or, highest rank eats first, down the line. The cake map stands for togetherness, simultaneity, shared experience. Not necessarily good: it was also used by the West to carve up Africa.

The cake is an issue; the slices are aspects. How it is defined, how it is cut, who are invited is essential. Basic to the cake map is equality among parties and slices: all get theirs at the same time.

For the Syria issue the Resolution lists the aspects on the road:
• 25 January 2016 (in two weeks) as the target date to begin talks;
• immediately all parties stop attacking civilians;
• within one month: options for a ceasefire monitoring mechanism;
• within 6 months “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance”;
• within 18 months “free and fair elections–by the new constitution”.

Kamal mentions many actors and crucial problems with this agenda. The focus here is on the linearity: ceasefire-governance-constitution-free and fair elections. Why stop attacking civilians who can become or are combatants? Why should actors agree to a ceasefire before their rights are guaranteed in a constitution? Why non-sectarian “governance” in a sectarian country? Each step presupposes the next. The “peace process” can be blocked, at any point, by any one party. Like a road.

Proposal: On 25 January, appoint four representative commissions– one for each of the four aspects–with mechanisms of dialogue for all six pairs and plenaries. Then report on all aspects on the agenda.

Back to the cake, “Syria.” Does “Syria” exist? Once much of the Middle East, the name was used for the French “mandate” carved out of the vast Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1916 when ended by Sykes-Picot. A commission on the Ottoman period, exploring millets for minorities, is indispensable. So is a commission on the Sykes-Picot trauma, also with Turkey as a member; hopefully with UK-France-Russia apologizing.

We have seen it before. The US was a major party to the conflict and the UN conference manager 2013-14. There are now more parties: Jordan has identified up to 160 terrorist groups (Kamal), probably not counting state terrorists. And today the UN is the conference manager.

This column at the time (27 Jan 2014) identified seven Syria conflicts:
1 Minority/majority, democracy/dictatorship, Assad/not Assad in Syria;
2 Sunni/Shia all over, also with “Sunni Islamic State Iraq-Syria ISIS”;
3 Syrians/minorities “like Turks and Kurds, Maronites and Christians”;
4 Syria/”those who, like USA and Israel, prefer Syria fragmented”;
5 Syria/Turkey with “neo-Ottoman expansionist policies”;
6 USA-UK-France/Russia-China “determined to avoid another Libya”;
7 Violent perpetrators of all kinds/killed-bereaved-potential victims.

All seven are still there. They have become more violent, like the second, between Saudi Arabia–also financing IS–and Iran. But the resolution focuses on the first and the last. All parties mentioned should be invited or at least consulted publicly. Last time Iran was excluded, defined as the bad one; this time IS(IS), today called Daesh.

A process excluding major process parties is doomed in advance.

However, imagine that the cake is defined as, “the conflict formation in and around Syria”; that the slices are the seven conflicts indicated with one commission for each; that around the table are the actors mentioned, some grouped together. The Resolution aspects are on their agendas; with commissions on the Ottoman Empire and Sykes-Picot.

What can we expect, what can we reasonably hope for, as visions?

“Mandate”, “colony”: there is some reality to Syria (and to Iraq). The borders are hopeless and should be respected, but not for a unitary state. For something looser, a (con)federation. Basic building-blocs would be provinces from Ottoman times, millets for smaller minorities, and cantons for the strip of Kurds along the Turkish border. The constitution could define a national assembly with two chambers: one territorial for the provinces, and one non-territorial for nations and faiths with some cultural veto in matters concerning themselves.

There is also the Swiss model with the assembly being based on territorially defined cantons, and the cabinet on nations-faiths: of 7 members 3 speak German, 1 Rheto-roman, 2 French and 1 Italian (4 Protestant and 3 Catholic?). Not impossible for Syria. With the Kurds as some kind of Liechtenstein (that is where con-federation enters).

In addition to parallel NGO fora. There is much to articulate.

Assad or not? If he is excluded as punishment for violence, there are many to be excluded. A conference only for victims, and China?

Better see it as human tragedy-stupidity, and build something new.

The violent parties will not get what they want. The victims can be accommodated peacefully in this looser Syria. Moreover, the perpetrators should fund reconstruction proportionate to the violence they wrought in the past four years. As quickly as humanly possible.

Syria offered a poor choice between a minority dictatorship with tolerance and a majority dictatorship–democracy–without. Violence flourished, attracting old suspects for proxy wars. “Bomb Syria” was the panacea, after “bomb Libya”. What a shame. Bring it to an end.

*Johan Galtung’s editorial originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 January 2016: TRANSCEND Media Service – TMS: Syria (Minding the Minds II)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 25 2015 (IPS)

The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.

In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.

Roberto Savio

It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

In fact, it was left up to bureaucrats of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to take decisions regarding Ukraine, the same kind of bureaucrats as those appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission who, with their usual arrogance, decided the European bailout conceded to Greece where it is widely known that the priority was to refund European (especially German) banks.

The media have a great responsibility in this situation. In all latter day conflicts, from Kosovo to Libya, the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that. Let us be to the point and crisp.“The media have a great responsibility … the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that”

The latest example. All media have been talking of the Iraqi army engaged in taking back the town of Kirkuk from the Caliphate, the Islamic State. But how many are also informing that two-thirds of the Iraqi army is actually made up of soldiers from Iran? And that the Americans engaged in overseeing this offensive are in fact accepting cooperation from Iran, formally an archenemy?

How many have been reporting that the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear capabilities of Iran are really based on the need to restore legitimacy to Iran, because it has become clear that without Iran there is no way to solve Arab conflicts? And how many have informed that all radical Muslims have received financial support from  Saudi  Arabia, which is intent on supporting Salafism, the Muslim school which is at the basis of al-Qaeda and now of the Islamic State?

Recent history shows the West has gone into a number of conflicts (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012), without looking beyond the immediate consequences, and without any consideration for long-term analysis. The costs of those conflicts have always exceeded the benefits foreseen. An auditor company could not certify any of those conflicts in terms of costs and benefit.

Let us start from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and let us remind ourselves that the West has three principles of international law under which to shield itself as a result of its actions.

One is the principle of inviolability of state borders, which was not applied to Serbia, but is now the case for Ukraine. The second is the principle of self-determination of people, which was used in Kosovo for the Albanian minority living in that part of Serbia but it is not considered valid now for the Russian populations of East Ukraine. The third is the right to intervene for humanitarian interventions, which was used first in Libya, and is now under consideration for Syria.

The drama of the Balkan conflicts was due to a very unilateral action by Germany, which decided to extrapolate Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation as its zone of economic interest. The then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, pushed this in an unprecedented way throughout the West.

It was the first time that Germany had play an assertive role, with U.S. support, and it was a Cold War reflex – let us eliminate the only country left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which still inspires itself to a socialist state and not to a market economy.

Serbia, which considered itself heir to the Kingdom of Serbia (out of which Josep Broz Tito had created the socialist Yugoslavia), intervened and a terrible conflict ensued, with civilians paying a dramatic cost.

That conflict renewed dormant ethnic and religious divisions, about which everybody knew, but Genscher, who was then no longer in the German government, explained at a meeting in which the author participated: “I never thought the Serbians would resist Europe.”

It is interesting to note in this context that just a few weeks ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia had engaged in a genocidal war. The news was reported by many media, but without a word of contextualisation.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been destroyed to implement the winning theory of “free market against socialism”. Did the creation of five mini-states improve the lives of the people? Not according to statistics, especially of youth unemployment, which was unknown in the days of Tito.

Then there was Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in September 2001, the rationale for attacking the country was based on assertions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was both harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the attack, and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. These, which turned out to be lies, were blindly propagated by the media

But if, as is widely believed, petroleum was the cause, let us look at figures as an accounting company would do. That war is estimated to have cost at least two trillion dollars, without considering human life and physical destruction.

Iraq’s annual petroleum output at full pre-war capacity was 3.7 million barrels per day. Now a part of that is under the control of the Islamic State and Kurds have taken more than one-third under their control. But even at the full production, it would have taken more than 20 years to recoup the costs of the war.

It is, to say the least, unlikely that the United States would have had all that time – and since the war, has spent more than a further trillion dollars just in occupation and military costs.

And what about Afghanistan where there is no petroleum? Two trillion dollars have also been spent there … and the aim of that war was just to capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden!

Among others, it was said that democracy would be brought to Afghanistan. Now, after more than 50.000 deaths, nobody speaks any longer of institutional building, and the United States and its allies are simply trying to extricate themselves from a country whose future is bleak.

Now, the question I want to raise here is the following: what has happened to looking beyond the immediate consequences and long-term analysis in foreign policy?

Is it possible that nobody in power questioned the wisdom of an intervention in Libya for example, even assuming that Muammar Gaddafi was a villain to remove?  Did any of them ask what would happen afterwards? Did any of those in power ask what it would mean to support a war to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and what would happen after?

It appears that the House of Lords is right, we are taken into conflict by sleepwalkers. The West is responsible either for creating countries which are not viable (Kosovo), or for disintegrating countries (Yugoslavia and now probably Iraq), or for opening up areas of instability (Libya, Syria).

Without mentioning Ukraine where intervention is aimed at pushing the country towards Europe and NATO, thus provoking the potential retaliation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Those errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and, altogether, cost at least seven trillion dollars. Who is going to wake the sleepwalkers up? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Balochistan Liberation Army commander Baloch Khan checks his rifle alongside his three escorts, somewhere in the Sarlat Mountains on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
SARLAT MOUNTAINS, Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Dec 24 2014 (IPS)

The media tend to portray Balochistan as “troubled”, or “restive”, but it would be more accurate to say that there´s actually a war going on in this part of the world.

Balochistan is the land of the Baloch, who today see their land divided by the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is a vast swathe of land the size of France which boasts enormous deposits of gas, gold and copper, untapped sources of oil and uranium, as well as a thousand-kilometre coastline near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

In August 1947, the Baloch from Pakistan declared independence, but nine months later the Pakistani army marched into Balochistan and annexed it, sparking an insurgency that has lasted, intermittently, to this day.

Now senior Baloch rebel commanders say that Islamabad is training Islamic State (IS) fighters in Pakistan´s southern province of Balochistan.

IPS met Baloch fighters at an undisclosed location in the Sarlat Mountains, a rocky massif, right on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and equidistant from two Taliban strongholds: Kandahar in south-eastern Afghanistan and Quetta in southwest Pakistan."Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan" – Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army

The fighters claimed to have marched for twelve hours from their camp to meet this IPS reporter.

They are four: Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and Mama, Hayder and Mohamed, his three escorts, who do not want to disclose their full names.

“This is an area of ​​high Taliban presence but they use their own routes and we stick to ours so we hardly ever come across them,” explains commander Khan, adding that he wants to make it clear from the beginning that the Baloch liberation movement is “at the antipodes of fundamentalism”.

“Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan,” says Khan. At 41, he has spent half of his life as a guerrilla fighter. “I joined as a student,” he recalls.

The senior commander refuses to disclose the number of fighters in the BLA’s ranks but he does say that they are deployed in 25 camps throughout “East Balochistan [under the control of Pakistan]”.

Khan admits parallelisms between his group and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), also a “secular group fighting for their national rights,” as he puts it

“We feel very close to the Kurds. One could say they are our cousins, and their land is also stolen by their neighbours,” says the commander, referring to the common origin of Baloch and Kurds, and the division of the latter into four states: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Historically a nomadic people, the Baloch have had a moderate vision of Islam. However, Khan accuses Islamabad of pushing the conflict into a sectarian one.

The Baloch insurgent groups in Pakistan are markedly secular and share a common agenda focusing on the independence of Balochistan. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“Until 2000 not a single Shia was killed in Balochistan. Today Pakistan is funnelling all sorts of fundamentalist groups, many of them linked to the Taliban, into Balochistan, to quell the Baloch liberation movement,” claims the guerrilla fighter, adding that target killings and enforced disappearances are a common currency in his homeland.

The Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, a group advocating peaceful protest founded by some of the families of the disappeared, puts the number of people from Balochistan since 2000 at more than 19,000, although exact figures are impossible to verify because no independent investigation has yet been conducted.

However, in August this year, the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called on Pakistan’s government “to stop the deplorable practice of state agencies abducting hundreds of people throughout the country without providing information about their fate or whereabouts.”

Baloch insurgent groups, however, have also been accused of murdering civilians. In August 2013, the BLA took responsibility for the killing of 13 people after the two buses they were travelling in were stopped by fighters in Mach area, about 50km (31 miles) south-east of the provincial capital, Quetta.

Pakistani officials said they were civilians returning home to Punjab to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Commander Khan shares another version:

“There were 40 people in two buses. We arrested and investigated 25 of them and we finally executed 13, all of whom belonged to the Pakistani Security Forces,” assures Khan, lamenting that a majority of the foreign media “relies solely on Pakistani government official sources.”

Could an independence referendum like the one held in Scotland possibly help to unlock the Baloch conflict? Khan looks sceptical:

“Before such a step, we´d need to settle down both the national and geographic borders as many parts of our land lie in Sindh and Punjab – the neighbouring provinces. Besides, there´s a growing number of settlers and the army is in full control of the country, election processes included,” the commander claims bluntly.

Instead of a consultation, the rebel fighter openly asks for a full intervention, “not just moral support but also a military and economic intervention.”

“The civilised world should support us, not Pakistan. Why help a country that is struggling to feed fundamentalist groups across the world?” asks the guerrilla commander before he and his men resume the long way back to their base.

Balochistan and beyond

The meeting with the BLA leader was only possible via Afghanistan, because Pakistan’s south-western province remains a “no go” area due to a veto enforced by Islamabad.

“The province has the worst record in Pakistan for journalists being killed so local journalists usually censor themselves to avoid being harassed, jailed or worse. Meanwhile, foreigner journalists are deported if they try to access the area,” Ahmed Rashid, a best-selling Pakistani writer and renowned Central Asia commentator, who was an activist on behalf of Balochistan in his youth, told IPS.

The visa ban over this reporter after working undercover in the region was no hurdle to get the viewpoint of Allah Nazar, commander in chief of the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF).

Through a satellite phone, this former medical doctor from Quetta corroborates commander Khan´s statements on a “common goal for the entire Baloch insurgency movement”. He also endorses the BLA commander´s analysis of Islamabad’s alleged backing of fundamentalist groups.

“Pakistan is breeding fundamentalists to counter the Baloch nationalist movement but it has entirely failed. Now they are trying to use the instrument of religion in order to distract attention from the Baloch freedom movement,” Nazar explains from an unspecified location in Makran – southern Balochistan province – where the BLF has its strongholds.

According to the movement´s leader, such threat could well transcend the boundaries of this inhospitable region. Commander Nazar gave the coordinates of “at least four training camps” where members of the Islamic State would reportedly be receiving instruction before being transferred to the Middle East:

“There´s one is in Makran, and another one in Wadh, 990 and 315 km south of Quetta respectively,” says the guerrilla fighter. “A third one is in the Mishk area of Zehri – 200 km south of Quetta – and there are more than 100 armed men there: Arabs, Pashtuns, Punjabis and others who are based there with the help of Sardar Sanaullah Zehri [a local tribal leader]. The fourth camp is near Chiltan, in Quetta.”

Nazar adds that Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) is “both activating and patronising the Islamic State.”

“The Islamic State is overwhelmingly present among us. They even throw pamphlets in our streets to advocate their view of Islam and get new recruits,” denounces Nazar.

In October 2014, six key Pakistani Taliban commanders, including the spokesman of Tehrik-e-Taliban – a Pakistan conglomerate of several Pakistani insurgent groups – announced their allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“IS is simply an upgraded version of the Talibans and finds sympathy with the ruling establishment in Pakistan,” human rights activist Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur told IPS.

Talpur, who has been challenged and attacked repeatedly for writing about such uncomfortable issues for Islamabad, claims that creating the Taliban is “the core of state policy which has not yet given up on this megalomaniacal scheme of Islam ruling the world.”

Despite repeated calls and e-mails, Pakistani officials refused to talk to IPS. However, the issue is seemingly a well-known secret after the Minister of Interior himself, Nisar Ali Khan, recently told Parliament that even in the naval base in Karachi –Pakistan´s main port and commercial city – there is support for the activities of radical religious groups.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

One of the ancient yet vanishing Mandaean rituals in Baghdad, at the banks of the Tigris river. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KIRKUK, Iraq, Nov 8 2014 (IPS)

“Going  back home? That would be suicide. The Islamists would cut our throats straight away,” says Khalil Hafif Ismam. The fear of this Mandaean refugee sums up that of one of the oldest yet most decimated communities in Mesopotamia.

“We had our house and two jewellery shops back in Baiji – 230 km north of Baghdad – but when ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] took over the area in June we had to leave for sheer survival,” recalls Khalil Ismam from the Mandaean Council compound in Kirkuk, 100 km east of Baiji. That is where he shares a roof with the family of his brother Sami, and the mother of both.

The Ismams are Mandaeans, followers of a religion that experts have tracked back 400 years before Christ, and which consider John the Baptist as their prophet. Accordingly, their main ritual, baptism, has taken place in the same spots on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates for almost two millennia.

In the sixteenth century, Portuguese Jesuit missionaries attempted to convert them to Christianity in Basra (southern Iraq). Young Mandaeans were sent, often abducted, to evangelise far-flung Portuguese colonies such as today´s Sri Lanka. They were called the “Christians of St. John”, although Mandaeans solidly dissociate themselves from Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Ismams, a Mandaean displaced family, pose at the entrance of the Mandaean Council in Kikruk. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khalil Ismam and his brother, both jewellers in their late thirties, also come from Iraq´s far south. Talking to IPS, they explain how they moved to Baghdad in the 1980s, “looking for a better life”. After the first Gulf War in 1991, they were forced to relocate again, this time to Baiji. Today they are in Kirkuk but they have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

“The council has told us that we cannot stay over a month, but we still don´t know where to go next because ISIS is already at the gates of the city,” says Sami.

Among the little they could take with them, the silversmiths did not forget their sekondola – a medallion engraved with a bee, a lion and a scorpion, all of them surrounded by a snake. According to Mandaean tradition, it should protect them from evil."The most striking thing about the killings of Mandaeans in Iraq is that it ranges from monetary gain by the extremists to the more sinister reason of ethnically cleansing the population of Iraq to get rid of the entire population of Mandaeans” – Suhaib Nashi, General Secretary of the Mandaean Association Union in Exile

Talismans are likely among the few things they can stick to while Mandaean ancient rituals begin to disappear as their priests are driven into exile in the best case scenario. In Kirkuk, the dry bed of the Khasa River – a tributary of the Tigris – is not an option so the increasingly rare ceremonies are held in a makeshift water well inside the complex.

“Every two or three weeks a genzibra – Mandaean priest – comes from Baghdad to conduct the ritual but the road is getting more dangerous with each passing day,” laments Khalil Ismam, standing by the pond.

According to a report released by Human Rights Watch in February 2011, 90 percent of Mandaeans have either died or left the country since the invasion by the U.S.-led forces in 2003.

From his residence in Baghdad, Sattar Hillo, spiritual leader of the Mandaeans worldwide, told IPS that his community is facing their “most critical moment” in history, adding that there are around 10,000 of them left in Iraq.

But that was his assessment a few months before the ISIS threat in the region. Today, the situation has worsened considerably, as Suhaib Nashi, General Secretary of the Mandaean Association Union in Exile, sums up:

“In the past two months, our community in Iraq is suffering a real genocide at the hands of radical Islamists, and not just by ISIS”. Nashi told IPS that the situation is equally worrying in southern areas, where the followers of this religion are easy victims of either Shiite militias or common criminals.

“The most striking thing about the killings of Mandaeans in Iraq is that it ranges from monetary gain by the extremists to the more sinister reason of ethnically cleansing the population of Iraq to get rid of the entire population of Mandaeans,” denounces Nashi.

Seeking asylum

Khalima Mashmul, aged 39, is among the Mandaean refugees staying today at the local council. She tells IPS that she is originally from the south, but that she came to Kirkuk at the early age of 15, dragged by a forced population displacement campaign through which Saddam Hussein sought to alter the demographic balance of Kirkuk, where the Kurds are the majority.

Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen dispute this city which lies on top of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. What Mashmul has called “home” for nearly 25 years is still considered as one of the most dangerous spots in Iraq. And she knows it well.

“My husband is a police officer. He lost his right leg and four fingers of one hand after a bomb attack last June. Despite his injuries, they still force him to keep working,” this mother of four tells IPS. Like the Ismams, they cannot stay indefinitely.

“We cannot go back home because my husband is threatened but we don´t have enough money to pay a rent,” laments Mashmul. Their only option, she adds, is that “Australia or any European country” grants them political asylum.

That is likely the dream of the majority in Iraq. In a report on the Iraq crisis released last month, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says that 1.8 million Iraqis have been internally displaced since January this year. The report also adds that 600,000 of them need urgent help due to the imminent arrival of winter.

While many wait impatiently to move to a Western country, some others have opted for an easier relocation in neighbouring countries.

Chabar Imad Abid, one of the policemen – all of them Mandaean – managing security at the compound, tells IPS that he does not regret being left alone by his family, saying: “My wife and my five children are in Jordan and I will join them as soon as I can.”

“We have just been told that ISIS is gathering forces in Hawija – 50 km west of Kirkuk,” says the policeman, meaning that the offensive over Kirkuk is “imminent”.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Ali Khalil and his son, Diar, pose by the coffins they have just arranged for burial. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
SEREKANIYE, Syria, Nov 3 2014 (IPS)

The walls of the Association for the Martyrs of Serekaniye are covered with the portraits of those fallen in combat in this northern Syrian town. Ali Khalil has buried everyone and each of them with the help of Diar, his 13-year-old son.

Inside this building west of Serekaniye, 680 kilometres northeast of Damascus, Khalil invites IPS to hear some of the stories behind the myriad of pictures. The first one is that of his brother, Abid.

“He dreamed of being a journalist but he was hit by a sniper in November 2012. He was the first one I buried, and I have done the same with the rest ever since,” recalls this former merchant in his late thirties, before resuming his account.

“These three arrived completely charred; this one was beheaded, the same as those two further up” … Khalil points with his finger at just half a dozen among more than a hundred portraits staring at infinity.“5.5 million children have been directly affected by the war [in Syria], one in ten has become a refugee in a neighbouring country and around 8,000 of the latter crossed the border without their parents” – UNICEF

It was precisely the death of his brother which led him to set up this committee to support the families of the deceased. He is one of the ten members in charge.

“Other than arranging the burial, we assist families with money, food or blankets for the winter,” explains Khalil. The aid, he adds, comes from the Kurdish provisional government in northern Syria

After the uprising of 2011 against the Syrian government, the country’s Kurds opted for a neutrality that has forced them into clashes with both government and opposition forces.

In July 2012 they took over the areas where they form a majority, in Syria’s north. Today they rule over three enclaves in the north: Afrin, Jazeera and Kobani, the latter being known worldwide for the brutal and still on-going six-week siege at the hands of the Islamic State.

Redur Xelil, spokesman for the YPG (Kurdish acronym for People’s Protection Units), the militia defending the territory, told IPS that after Kobani, the battle in Serekaniye has been the bloodiest front for the Kurds in Syria.

A burial in Serekaniye for fighters fallen in combat against ISIS. Credit: Qadir Agid

Mahmud Rashid, 37, also volunteers at the martyrs´ house. He has two sisters and nine brothers, “all of them fighting, including a 60-year-old one.” He adds, however, that one of them, Brahim, fell into the hands of the Islamic State five months ago, and that they have had no news from him ever since.

“His wife showed up four days ago to get help. We handed her clothes for her seven children, blankets and 10,000 Syrian pounds [about 48 euros],” Rashid told IPS.

“I will be a soldier”

The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the truck carrying the last two coffins commissioned by the association. After they are taken into the room, Khalil and his son start to wrap them in the regular red cloth, to which they will add the yellow banner of the YPG and a crown of plastic flowers.

They proceed with the precision conferred by a two-year routine so it barely takes them more than ten minutes. Shrouding the bodies, Khalil explains, is “much more laborious.” But he´s not alone.

“Diar helps me with everything and does whatever is needed. We are hand in glove,” the volunteer explains proudly, posing his hand over his son’s shoulders. Khalil has another son, Rojdar, who is 11 but cannot join them because he suffers from chronic hepatitis and never leaves the house.

In a report on the impact of three years of war on the health of Syria’s children released this year, Save the Children warns of the serious deterioration of sanitary conditions in the country. According to Save the Children, 60 percent of hospitals in the country have been destroyed and the production of drugs has decreased by 70 percent.

To these figures has to be added the fact that half of the doctors in the country have left. Of the 2,500 that a city like Aleppo needs, only 36 remain, says Save the Children. With representation in 120 countries, it is calling for “urgent action” so that children receive basic vaccination.

Meanwhile, it is far from easy to get a word from Diar. “Why don´t you want to talk now,” Khalil asks his son. “Tell him how much you loved your uncle; tell him you would spend the day together at the Internet café.”

Diar admits he has not much to do other than helping his father. “A majority of the children have left the city and the few remaining don´t dare to leave home because of the fighting,” explains the boy, without looking up from the ground.

For those who left, reality is far from bearable either. As noted by UNICEF in its 2014 report titled Under Siege: The devastating impact on children of three years of conflict in Syria, 5.5 million children have been directly affected by the war, one in ten has become a refugee in a neighbouring country and around 8,000 of the latter crossed the border without their parents.

Other than the most visible effects, the psychological sequels are equally devastating: “Many Syrian children are in pure survival mode”, says UNICEF child protection specialist Jane MacPhail, who spends her days working with child refugees in Jordan. “They have seen the most terrible things and forget normal social and emotional responses.”

“Tell the journalist what you used to say during the days when the shelling lasted day and night: ‘You can throw as many bombs as you want but we will never leave’,” Khalil insists with his son, while the boy concentrates on carefully centring the crown of flowers on the second coffin.

Diar stands up only to say that he will join the ranks of the YPG as soon as he is 18. The war in Syria may be over after five years but that does not seem to matter to him.

“I will be a soldier,” Diar repeats, with his eyes still fixed on the ground. Until then, he says, he will help his father.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Garbage collection is among the many duties of the Democratic Self-Management in force in the three mainly Kurdish enclaves of northern Syria. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
AMUDA, Syria, Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

There was never anything particularly remarkable about this northern town of 25,000. However, today it has become the lab for one the most pioneering political experiments ever conducted in the entire Middle East region.

Located 700 kilometres northeast of Damascus, Amuda hosts the headquarters of the so-called “Democratic Self-Management of Jazeera Canton”. Along with Afrin and the besieged Kobani, Jazeera is one of the three enclaves under Kurdish rule, although such a statement is not entirely accurate.

At the entrance of the government building, vice-president Elizabeth Gawrie greets IPS with a shlomo, “peace” in her native Syriac language.

“We decided to move here in January this year for security reasons because [Bashar Hafez al] Assad is still present in Qamishli – the provincial capital, 25 km east of Amuda,” notes the former mathematics teacher before tea is served.The so-called "third way" attracted sectors among the other local communities such as Arabs and Syriacs, a collaboration that would eventually materialise into a Social Contract, a kind of ‘constitution’ that applies to the three enclaves in question – Jazeera, Afrin and Kobani

After the outbreak of civil war in Syria in March 2011, the Kurds in the north of the country opted for a neutrality that has forced them into clashes with both government and opposition forces.

This so-called “third way” attracted sectors among the other local communities such as Arabs and Syriacs, a collaboration that would eventually materialise into a Social Contract, a kind of ‘constitution’ that applies to the three enclaves in question – Jazeera, Afrin and Kobani

“Each canton has its own government with its own president, two vice-presidents and several ministries: Economy, Women, Trade, Human Rights … up to a total of 22,” explains Gawrie. Among the ministers in Jazeera, she adds, there are four Arabs, three Christians and a Chechen; Syria has hosted a significant Caucasian community since the late 19th century.

“We have lived together for centuries and there is no reason why this should be changed,” claims the canton´s vice-president, ensuring that the Democratic Self-Management is “a model of peaceful coexistence that would also work for the whole of Syria.”

While there was no religious persecution under the Assads – both father and son – those who defended a national identity other than the Arab identity, as in the case of the Syriacs and the Kurds, were harshly repressed. Gawrie says that many members of her coalition – the Syriac Union Party – have either disappeared or are still in prison.

Neither did Arab dissidents feel much more comfortable under the Assads. Hussein Taza Al Azam, an Arab from Qamishli, is the canton´s co-vice-president alongside Gawrie. From the meeting room where the 25 government officials conduct their meetings, he summarises the hardship political dissidents like him have faced in Syria over the last five decades.

“Since the arrival of the Baath Party to power in 1963, Syria has been a one-party state. There was no freedom of speech, human rights were systematically violated … It was a country fully under the control of the secret services,” explains Azam, who completed his doctorate in economics in Romania after spending several years in prison for his political dissent.

Wounds from the recent past have yet to heal but, for the time being, Article 3 of the Social Contract describes Jazeera as “ethnically and religiously diverse” while three official languages are recognised in the canton: ​​Kurdish, Arabic and Syriac. “All communities have the right to teach and be taught in their native language,” according to Article 9.

But it is not just language rights that Azam is proud of. “The three regions under democratic self-management are an integral part of Syria,” he says, “but also a model for a decentralised system of government.”

The members of government in Jazeera are either independent or belong to eleven political parties. Since local communities took over the three enclaves in July 2012, local opposition sectors backed by Masoud Barzani, president of the neighbouring Kurdistan Region of Iraq, have accused the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – the leading party among Syrian Kurds – of playing a dominant role.

PYD co-president Salih Muslim bluntly denies such claims. “From the PYD we advocate for direct self-determination, also called ‘radical democracy’,” he says.

“Basically we aim to decentralise power so that the people are able to take and execute their own decisions. It is a more sophisticated version of the concept of democracy, and that is in full harmony with many several social movements across Europe,” the political leader told IPS.

Spanish journalist and Middle East expert Manuel Martorell describes the concept of democratic self-management as an “innovative experiment in the region” which reconciles a high degree of self-government with the existence of the states.

“It may not be the concept of independence as we understand it, but the crux of the matter here is that they´re actually governing themselves,” Martorell told IPS.

Akram Hesso, president of Jazeera canton, is one the independent members in the local government. So far, the on-going war has posed a major hurdle for the holding of elections so Hesso feels compelled to explain how he gained his seat eight months ago.

“We had several meetings until a committee of 98 members representing the different communities was set up. They were responsible for electing the 25 of us that make up the government today,” this lawyer in his late thirties told IPS.

On Oct. 15, the parliament in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region approved a motion calling on the Federal Kurdistan Government to recognise and improve links with the administrations in Afrin, Kobani and Jazeera.

And while Hesso labels the move as a “major step forward”, he does not forget what is allowing the Democratic Self-Management to take root.

“Not far away there is an open front where our people are dying to protect us,” notes the senior official, referring to Kobani, but also to the other open fronts in Jazeera and Afrin.

However, he adds, “it´s not just about defending territory; it´s also about sticking to an idea of living together.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Johan Galtung
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

More senseless bombing of Muslims, more defeats for the United States-West, more ISIS-type movements, more West-Islam polarisation. Any way out?

“ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq-Syria] Appeals to a Longing for the Caliphate”, writes Farhang Jahanpour in an IPS column. For the Ottoman Caliphate with the Sultan as Caliph – the Shadow of God on Earth – after the 1516-17 victories all over until the collapse of both Empire and Caliphate in 1922, at the hands of the allies England-France-Russia.

Johan Galtung

Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone.

And imagine that they who had brought about the collapse had a tendency to bomb, invade,  conquer, dominate Catholic countries, one after the other, like after the two [George] Bush wars in Afghanistan-Iraq, five Obama wars in Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia-Libya-Syria and “special operations”.

Would we not predict a longing for the Vatican, and an extreme hatred of the perpetrators? Fortunately, it did not happen.

But it happened in the Middle East, leaving a trauma fuelled by killing hundreds of thousands. The Sykes-Picot_Agreement between Britain and France of 16 May 1916 led to the collapse, with their four well-known colonies, the less known promise of Istanbul to Russia, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration offering parts of Arab lands as “national home for the Jewish people”. Jahanpour cites Winston Churchill as “selling one piece of real estate, not theirs, to two peoples at the same time”.“Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone”

The Middle East colonies fought the West through military coups for independence; Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk was a model. The second liberation is militant Islam-Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algiers and so on against secular military dictatorships.

The West prefers military order against history.

The longing cannot be stopped. ISIS is only one expression, and exceedingly brutal. But, damage and destruction by U.S. President Barack Obama and allies will be followed by a dozen ISIS from 1.6 billion Muslims in 57 countries.

A little military politicking today, some “training” here, fighting there, bombing all over, are only ripples on a groundswell. This will end with a Sunni caliphate sooner or later. And, the lost caliphate they are longing for had no Israel, only a “national home”. This is behind some of the U.S.-West despair. Any solution?

The way out is cease-fire and negotiation, under United Nations auspices, with full Security Council backing. To gain time, switch to a defensive military strategy, defending Baghdad, the Kurds, the Shia and others in Syria and Iraq.

The historical-cultural-political position of ISIS and its successors is strong.

The West cannot offer withdrawal in return for anything because it has already officially withdrawn. The West, however, can offer reconciliation, both in the sense of clearing the past and opening the future.

Known in the United States as “apologism”, a difficult policy to pursue. But for once the onus of Sykes-Picot is not on the United States, but on Britain and France.

Russia dropped out after the 1917 revolution, but revealed the plot.

Bombing, an atrocity, will lead to more ISIS atrocities. A conciliatory West might change that. An international commission could work on Sykes-Picot and its aftermath, and open the book with compensation on it.

Above all, future cooperation. The West, and here the United States enters, could make Israel return the West Bank, except for small cantons, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital – or else! – sparing the horrible long-lasting Arab-Israeli warfare.

This would be decency, sanity, rationality; the question is whether the West possesses these qualities. The prognosis is dim.

There is the Anglo-American self-image as infallible, a gift to humanity, a little rough at times civilising the die-hards, but not weak.

If not an apology, at least they could wish to undo their own policies in the region since, say, 1967. No sign of that.

So much for the willingness. Does the West have the ability? Does it know how to reconcile?

After Portugal and England conquering the East China-East Africa sea lane around 1500, ultimately establishing themselves in Macao and Hong Kong, after the First and Second Opium wars of 1839-1860 in China, ending with Anglo-French forces burning the Imperial Palace in Beijing, did Britain use the “hand over” of Hong Kong to reflect on the past?

Not a word from Prince Charles.

China could have flattened those two colonies – but did not. Given that Islam has retaliation among its values, the West may be in for a lot.

Le Nouvel Observateur lists “groupes terroristes islamistes” in the world: Iraq-Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Chechenya.

The groups, named, grew out of similar local circumstances. Imagine that they increasingly share that longing for a caliphate; the Ottoman Empire covered much more than the Middle East, way into Africa and Asia. And more groups are coming. Invincible.

Imagine that Turkey itself shares that dream, maybe hoping to play a major role (in the past, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu a superb academic, a specialist on the Empire.)

Could that be the reason for Turkey not really joining, as it seems, this anti-ISIS crusade?

The West should be realistic, not “realist”. Switch to rationality. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Iraqi President Fouad Massoum said this past week that the government was looking for an independent Sunni Muslim to fill the post of defense minister in an effort to improve chances of reunifying the country and defeating the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS).

Massoum, in his first extended comments to a U.S. audience since his recent selection as president of Iraq, also said Sept. 26 that Iraqi Kurds – while they might still hold a referendum on independence – would not secede from Iraq at a  time of such major peril.

“Today there is no possibility to announce such a state,” Massoum, a Kurd and former prime minister of the Kurdish region, told a packed room at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“Forming a Kurdish state is a project, and a project like that has to take into account” the views of regional and other countries and the extraordinary circumstances of the current terrorist menace to Iraq.

Kurdish threats to hold a referendum and declare independence were widely seen as leverage to force the resignation of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki,also under pressure from President Barack Obama’s administration, Iraqi Sunnis and Iran, stepped down to allow a less  polarizing member of his Shi’ite Dawa party – Haider al-Abadi – to take the top job.

Abadi, however, has been unable so far to get parliament to approve his choices for the sensitive posts of defense and interior ministers. Queried about this, Massoum said, “There seems to be some understanding that the minister of defense should be Sunni and there is a search for an independent Sunni.”

As for interior minister, Massoum said, they were looking for an “independent Shiite” to take the post.

For the time being, Abadi is holding the portfolios, but unlike his predecessor, who retained them, has clearly stated that he does not want to assume those responsibilities for long. Massoum said a decision was likely after the coming Muslim holiday, the Eid al-Adha.

The Iraqi president also said there was progress on a new arrangement for sharing Iraq’s oil revenues, a major source of internal grievances under Maliki. A decision has been made that each of the regions will have representation on a higher oil and gas council, Massoum said. He also expressed confidence in Iraq’s new oil minister, Adel Abdel-Mahdi.

Asked whether Iraq would split into three countries – as Vice President Joe Biden once recommended – Massoum said there might be an eventual move toward a more confederal system but “partitioning Iraq … into three independent states is a bit far-fetched, especially in the current situation.”

Massoum began his remarks with a fascinating explanation of how IS – which he called ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams – came into being. He said the group began “as a marriage” between nationalist military officers and religious extremists that took place when they were in prison together while the U.S. still occupied Iraq.

The notion of combining Iraq with the Levant – made up of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan – is actually an old Arab nationalist concept, Massoum said.

As for the religious aspects of the movement, Massoum traced that to the so-called Hashishin – users of hashish. This Shiite group, formed in the late 11th century, challenged the then-Sunni rulers of the day, used suicide attacks and were said to be under the influence of drugs. The English word “assassin” derives from the term.

“Many times these terrorist practices [were used] in the name of a religion or a sect,” Massoum said.

He praised the United States for coming to the aid of Iraqis and Kurds against IS and also expressed support for the recent bombing of IS and Jabhat al-Nusra positions in Syria. But Massoum sidestepped repeated questions about whether such strikes would inadvertently bolster the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Hitting ISIS in Syria should not mean this is to support the regime or as a beginning to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad,” Massoum said. “That’s why the attacks are limited.”

Asked about Iraqi relations with Iran and whether the Iraqis and Kurds were serving as go-betweens for the United States and Iran in mutual efforts to degrade IS, Massoum noted Iraq’s historic relations with its neighbour and that Iraq also had common interests with the United States.

“We don’t look at America with Iranian eyes and we don’t look at Iran with American eyes,” Massoum said. He evaded questions about Iran’s military role in Iraq, saying that while he had heard reports that Quds Force Chief Qasem Soleimani had visited the Kurdish region, requests for a meeting were not fulfilled.

As for Iranian military advisers who were said to have helped liberate the town of Amerli and relieve the siege of Mt. Sinjar, Massoum said, there were “many  experts” who had come to help the Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Massoum attributed the collapse of the Iraqi army at Mosul to poor leadership, corruption and decades of setbacks starting with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980. This was followed a decade later by his invasion of Kuwait and subsequent refusal to cooperate with the international community.

“These blows all had an impact on the psychology of the commanders and soldiers,” Massoum said. Iraqi armed forces have gone “from failure to failure.”

The president confirmed that under the new Iraqi government, each governorate will have its own national guard made up of local people. This concept – which may be partly funded by the Saudis and other rich Gulf Arabs – is an attempt to replicate the success of the so-called sons of Iraq by motivating Sunni tribesmen to confront IS as they previously did al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Asked what would happen to Shi’ite militias – which have committed abuses against Sunnis and helped alienate that population from Baghdad – Massum said the militias would eventually have to be shut down but only after the IS threat had been eliminated. He did not indicate how long that might take.

Massum was also asked about reported IS plots against U.S. and French subway systems. Abadi earlier this week made reference to such plots, but U.S. officials said they had no such intelligence.

Iraqi officials accompanying Massoum, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said Abadi had been misinterpreted and was referring only to the types of attacks IS might mount in the West. Massoum warned, however, that “sleeper cells” in the West as well as in Iraq might be planning terrorist attacks.

Asked about Turkey – which has been reticent about aiding Iraq against IS – Massoum, who met at the U.N. this week with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he expected more help now that 49 Turkish hostages in Mosul have been freed.

Massoum also urged Turkey to do a better job vetting young men who arrive there from Europe and America, and prevent them from reaching border areas and slipping into IS-controlled areas in Syria.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

What remains of a street in Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The woman who walked into the Islamic Front (IF) media office near the Turkish border was on the verge of fainting under the hot Syrian sun, but all she cared about was her infant son.

With over half of the country’s population displaced, she was just one of the parents among the more than three million UN-registered Syrian refugees grappling with how to keep their children safe and healthy while dealing with the innumerable dangers inherent in war zones, refugee camps and statelessness.

When IPS met the young woman in early August, she was living in the nearby Bab Al-Salama camp in northern Syria after having been displaced from an area of heavy fighting.Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

The infant was only a few weeks old and needed to be breastfed, but there was nowhere out of the sight of men. And so, wearing a stifling niqab, she asked to use the room that now serves to ‘register’ foreign journalists crossing the border.

The room afforded some shade and privacy in which to breastfeed and, once the twenty-two-year-old former fighter in charge of the office had stepped out, she started feeding her child.

As she blew gently his sweaty forehead, the woman told IPS that she had kidney problems and could not sit – she could only lie down or stand up. She said that she was also having problems accessing medical care, for both herself and her feverish son. And even if the black abaya covering her body and the niqab over her face were hot, ‘’it’s better to use them,’’ she said, ‘’it’s war”.

The area around the Bab Al-Salama camp just across the border from the Turkish town of Kilis has been bombed several times, including a car bomb in May that killed dozens.

On the other side of the border, the camps that the Turkish government has set up for the over 800,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations are said to be able to accommodate fewer than 300,000 of them.

In formal and informal refugee camps throughout the world, women are notoriously at risk of sexual crimes. Alongside economic issues, many parents on both sides of the border cite this as a reason to marry off their daughters earlier, in the attempt to ‘’protect their honour’’ and find someone to provide for them.

The children resulting from these unions are almost always unable to be registered and are thus stateless, joining the ranks of the many Syrian Kurds and others denied citizenship under Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

Mohamed was an officer in the Syrian regime’s army. From a fairly large tribe in Idlib, his family was targeted by the regime once the conflict began and he has fought with different Free Syrian Army brigades over the past few years.

Soon after a number of women were reportedly raped by ’shabiha’ in his area, he moved his young wife, mother and sisters across the border. He now crosses illegally into Turkey to see them when not fighting.

Street scene in rebel-held Aleppo, August 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

Mohamed is seeking ways to reach Europe. When IPS first met him in autumn of 2013, he had no intention of leaving. However, since then, his first son has been born, stateless.  The Syrian regime did not issue passports to officers in order to prevent them from defecting even prior to the 2011 uprising, and none of his family possesses one.

As a professional soldier without a salary and with no moderate rebel groups providing adequate wages to support a family, as well as no desire to join extremist groups – many of which would pay better – he feels does not know how else he can provide for his family.

‘’There’ s no future here,’’ he said.

On the Turkish side of the border, Ahmad – originally from Aleppo, Syria’s industrial capital – says he does not want to leave the region.

“I once asked my wife what country in the world she would go to if she could, and she answered ‘Syria’,’’ he told IPS proudly.

However, he added that he had stopped going backwards and forwards as a fixer and media activist as the day approached for his wife to give birth and the situation in Aleppo worsened.

When children approached a table as IPS was having tea with him in a Turkish border town, he somewhat gruffly told a little girl begging that she should ‘’work, even if that means selling packets of tissues on the streets.’’

‘’They have to learn to work and not just ask for money. Turks are starting to get angry that we are here,’’ he said.

Over 200,000 Syrians are living outside the camps in Gaziantep and rent prices have roughly tripled since the massive influx of refugees starting. Protests broke out in mid-August against their presence, and they are increasingly being targeted by violence.

Meanwhile, some attempts are being made to raise money for schools inside Syria that would be virtual ‘bunkers’, as Assad’s regime continues to target both schools and medical facilities.

In rebel-held Aleppo, IPS stayed with a Syrian family for a number of days in August as the regime barrel bombing campaign continued and as the danger of an impending siege by government forces or a takeover by the extremist Islamic State (IS) became more likely.

The eldest of the family’s four girls – only eight-years-old – had recently been hit by a sniper’s bullet while crossing the road to one of the few schools still functioning. Although it was healing, the exit wound will leave a very ugly scar on her arm.

Whenever the bombs fell during the night, the occupants of the room would move about restlessly, while the eight-year-old was always already awake, staring into the dark, utterly motionless.

Her father was adamant, however, that – come what may – the family would not leave.

In the late afternoon, little boys could be seen playing outside in the street with scant protection from snipers, only the nylon tarp of a former UNHCR tent hung across the street in an attempt to shield them. Large gaping holes marked the buildings, or what was left of them, in the street around them.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Among the labyrinth of winding narrow streets just outside a major shopping centre in the Kumkapi neighbourhood of Istanbul is a rundown road, congested with shops and apartments stacked atop one another.

Istanbul’s “Somalia Street” – so called because immigrants from Somalia (and elsewhere in Africa) have adopted it as a staging post during long, rigorous journeys to find permanent homes. Credit: Hannah Tayson

Cars somehow manage to come barrelling down the street as people slowly move to the narrow pavement already full of food carts and clothes strewn out on blankets for sale. Trash lazily rolls past groups of men engaged in conversation while sitting on buckets or leaning against shop windows. The area feels oddly serene.

This street is host to a community of African refugees, with the majority comprising Somali natives, and aptly named “Somalia Street”. Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul, in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades.

Istanbul has become a staging post for Somalis hoping to eventually travel on to Australia, Canada or the United States, migration trend watchers say.  Because of the constant population flux, it is difficult to estimate the number of refugees actually living on the street at any given moment, but street residents say that there are a few hundred Somalis living there.

Dalmar, 30, a Somali refugee, has only been in Istanbul for a month with his brother Amet, 20, and lives in a small apartment with 12 other refugees. This arrangement is very common here. Often, refugees will live in small apartments with 20 or 30 other people.

“Istanbul is very temporary,” said Dalmar. “The living conditions are poor. Istanbul is expensive, and it is very hard to find work here.”

Turkish labour laws require a passport and residence card for employment, neither of which refugees can easily obtain. This has led to much illegal work, usually consisting of manual labour and odd jobs.Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul [Somalia Street], in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades

A refugee who has lived in Turkey for many years, Liban, 31, said he worked in various manual labour jobs when he first arrived in Istanbul. He pointed out that that the language barrier between Arabic and Turkish makes it “difficult to get jobs in the first place.”

Yet inhabitants appear to have established a unique community along the littered, cobblestone street. Most Somalis interviewed said they enjoy life in Istanbul. The community takes care of them as they arrive in droves. Often, refugees will find work with Kurdish shop owners, who seem rather protective of them.

During one interview with a group of refugees, a Kurdish man popped his head of his shop out to make sure they were not being harassed.

The Katip Kasim mosque stands on Somali Street, its low brick wall recently painted white and orange. The mosque is rather unassuming compared to the grandiose and elegant mosques around Istanbul.

Muammer Aksoy has worked as Katip Kasim’s imam for 19 years, and has seen the community change significantly. This area of Istanbul has always been a refuge for minority groups in Istanbul, beginning with Kurdish migrants from Turkey’s east. Romanian refugees arrived in the 1980s and 1990s. There has since been an increase in African refugees to the area, the majority arriving within the last five years.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Somalia Street unites. Somalis are very devout Muslims. Once the sun begins to set, the Katip Kasim mosque courtyard fills with people waiting in line to receive their dinner to break the fast, or iftar.

Imam Aksoy began the community iftar dinners eight years ago, after seeing a Somali refugee attempt to break his fast with a small piece of bread, and by drinking soiled water from the fountains used to wash feet before entering the mosque.

“It is my responsibility as the imam to take care of my community,” said Aksoy. “I don’t discriminate between people here. Everyone is welcome.”

The imam has enlisted a different shop owner on the street each evening to provide the iftar dinner for 300 people.

A long-time resident and family friend of the imam, Arzu, has also seen the change in the community. “Refugees come because they heard people take care of them here,” she said proudly.

Turkey and Somalia have an unlikely partnership. According to a 2013 report by the Norwegian Peace Building Centre, Turkey has established networks in Africa, Somalia in particular, to enable peace-building efforts and humanitarian initiatives. In turn, says the report, this “strengthens Turkey’s international image as a global peace actor.”

“The relationship between Somalia and Turkey is very recent. It was just in 2011 that this relationship began,” said Dalmar. “Now there are scholarships and programmes for students.”

Somalia receives more aid from Turkey than any other African nation, with 93 million dollars in 2011, and 1,500 Somali students received scholarships to study at the public Istanbul University in 2013.

Abdifitah, 25, who has been living in the community for one year, was a scholarship recipient. To take advantage of the opportunity, Abdifitah and his family moved together from Somalia. His family cannot find work, but has moved with him in order to support him.

“Istanbul gave me a chance to learn,” said Abdifitah.

Recently, Somali refugees have been moving to Turkey’s capital, Ankara, because work is easier to find, and housing is cheaper than in overcrowded Istanbul.

Liban lives with his family in Ankara, but makes a living as a translator for the local African football league in Istanbul. When asked if he would like to go somewhere else, he shook his head.

“When I was younger, I really wanted to go to America. Now, if someone handed me an American passport, I wouldn’t take it,” said Liban. “I have everything I want here.”

Freelance writer Hannah Tayson was a foreign correspondent intern with the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) in Istanbul during the summer of 2014. She can be contacted at htayson@scu.edu

Which story line sounds the more credible – that linking the rebel movement ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) to policies pursued by Iran or that linking the Sunni extremist force to Iran’s adversary Saudi Arabia?

In June this year, fighters belonging to ISIS – a rebel movement that had previously established its foothold in the oil-rich areas of north-eastern Syria – succeeded in capturing Mosul, a city surrounded by oil fields in northern Iraq. Ever since, commentators in the world’s media have been speculating on the origins of the dreaded organisation’s military success.

It is admitted that the occupation of Mosul and vast tracts of the Sunni-dominated portion of Iraq would not have been possible except for the fact that ISIS forged a broad grassroots’ alliance expressing deep discontent by Iraq’s minority Sunnis with the policies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s government. Nor would Mosul have fallen but for the dramatic desertion by top-officers of Iraq’s state army.

Peter Custers

Yet various observers have meanwhile focused on the political economy behind the advance of ISIS. Some experts from U.S. think tanks have discussed the likely sources of ISIS’ finance, pinpointing private donors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Other writers instead have connected ISIS’ reliance on black market sales of oil in Kurdish territory with Iranian exports of crude, described as “illegal”.

I propose putting the spotlight on the methods of war financing used by ISIS, but first it is necessary to highlight the movement’s complete sectarianism.

Soon after the occupation of Mosul, rebels blew up and bulldozed shrines and mosques in the city belonging to Shia Muslims. Pictures on the demolition of these buildings were circulated widely by the world’s mainstream media. Unfortunately, few Western journalists cared to draw attention to the role which destruction of shrines has played in the history of Islam.

Contrary to Catholicism, the veneration of saints at Sufi and Shia tombs and shrines basically reflects heterodox tendencies within the Islamic faith. On the other hand, Sunni orthodoxy and especially its Saudi variety, Wahhabism, either condemns intercession or, at the least, considers the worshipping of saints at tombs to be unacceptable. Islam’s minority of Shias, and its mystical current of Sufism, freely engage in such worship – and this throughout the Muslim world.“ISIS is … a ‘religiously inspired’ Sunni extremist organisation with an utterly secular objective: to control the bulk of oil resources in two Middle Eastern states in order to re-establish acaliphat, an all-Islamic state-entity guided by a central religious authority”

ISIS’ work of demolition in Iraq can in no way be equated with practices of Iran’s Shia rulers. Instead, they express the extremist movement’s affinity with policies long championed by Saudi Arabia. Ever since the founding of the Saudi state, numerous Shia and Sufi shrines have been rased to the ground at the behest of this country’s Wahhabi dynasty.

What does the political economy behind ISIS’ military advance in Syria and Iraq tell us about the organisation’s affinities? First, in one sense, the ISIS strategy might be interpreted as rather novel.

Whereas the extraction of raw materials is a war strategy pursued by numerous rebel movements in the global South – see, for example, UNITA’s extraction of diamonds in the context of Angola’s civil war, and the trade in coltan by rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo – rarely has a Southern rebel movement succeeded in turning crude oil into its chief source of revenue.

Indeed, whereas ISIS originally relied on private funders in Saudi Arabia to build up a force of trained fighters, the organisation has consciously targeted regions in Syria and Iraq harbouring major oil fields and (in the case of Iraq) oil refineries. By laying siege to the oil refinery at Baiji, responsible for processing one-third of oil consumed in Iraq, ISIS hoped to undermine the state’s control of oil resources.

Further, some 450 million dollars was stolen by ISIS fighters from a subsidiary of Iraq’s central bank after the occupation of Mosul. This reportedly was all income from oil extraction. Some observers put the cash income which ISIS derives from smuggled oil at one million dollars a day!

ISIS is thus a ‘religiously inspired’ Sunni extremist organisation with an utterly secular objective: to control the bulk of oil resources in two Middle Eastern states in order to re-establish acaliphat, an all-Islamic state-entity guided by a central religious authority.

Yet though ISIS’ methodology of reliance on oil for financing of its war campaigns is novel for a rebel movement, such use of oil is not unique in the context of the Middle East. Ever since the 1970s, most oil-rich countries of the region have squandered a major part of their income from the exports of crude by (indirectly) exchanging their main natural resource against means of destruction – weapon systems bought on the international market.

And while Iran under the Shah was equally enticed into opting for this form of trade in the 1970s, – it is the Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia which all the way through from the oil crisis of 1973 onwards and up to today has functioned as the central axe of such a trade mechanism.

Witness, for instance, the 1980s oil-for-arms (!) ‘barter deal’ between the Saudi kingdom and the United Kingdom, the so-called ‘Al Yamamah’ deal, and the 60 billion dollar, largest-ever international arms’ agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States clinched in 2010.

Forward to 2014, and an Iraq desperately struggling to survive. A section of the world’s media has already announced its impending demise, predicting a split of the country into three portions – Sunni, Kurdish and Shia. On the other hand, some commentators have advised that the United States should now change gear and line up with Iran, in order to help the Iraqi government overcome its domestic political crisis.

Yet the United States and its European allies for long, too long, have bent over to service the Wahhabi state. Even as Western politicians loudly proclaimed their allegiance to democracy and secularism, they failed to oppose or counter Saudi Arabia’s oppression of, and utter discrimination against, Shia citizens.

For over 40 years they opted to close their eyes and supply Saudi Arabia with massive quantities of fighter planes, missiles and other weaponry, in exchange for the country’s crude. Playing the role of a wise elderly senior brother, the United States has recently advised Iraq’s prime minister al-Maliki, known for his sectarian approach, that he should be more ‘inclusive’, meaning sensitive towards Iraq’s minority Sunni population.

But has the United States’ prime Middle Eastern ally Saudi Arabia ever been chastised over its systematic discrimination of Shias? Has it ever been put to task for its cruel oppression of heterodox Muslims? And has the United States ever pondered the implications of the trading mechanism of disparate exchange it sponsored – for the future of democracy, food sovereignty and people’s welfare in the Middle East?

*  Peter Custers, an academic researcher on Islam and religious tolerance  with field work in South Asia, is also a theoretician on the arms’ trade and extraction of raw materials in the context of conflicts in the global South. He is the author of ‘Questioning Globalized Militarism’. 

The Kurdish flag is flying high in the wind from the rooftop of an old brick house inside Kirkuk’s millennia-old citadel, as Rashid – a stern-looking man sitting behind a machine gun – monitors the surroundings.

Rashid commands a small unit of a dozen fighters, members of the Kurdish armed forces – known as the Peshmerga – deployed to the oil-rich province since June 13.

On June 12, the Iraqi army evacuated its positions in Kirkuk province after its troops had earlier conceded control of the country’s second largest city, Mosul, in the face of advancing Sunni militant groups led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

“Since we have been deployed here things have changed,” says Rashid, a Peshmerga for 25 years, with a sense of pride. “It’s safer now and people can go out and do their daily business.”By appearing to favour Shia armed elements, Kurds might risk alienating the local Sunni Arabs and potentially push them toward cooperation with ISIS and other militant Sunni factions.

However, although the deployment of thousands of Peshmerga troops has in fact brought relative calm to the city so far, trouble appears to be brewing.

Rich in natural resources such as oil and home to a mixed population of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Christians, Kirkuk is no stranger to conflict. It has been at the heart of decades of armed and political struggles between the Kurds and successive Iraqi governments.

Since the Kurdish takeover there, armed Shia groups have been flexing their muscles, a move that has infuriated the considerable Sunni Arab population in the province and could be a potentially destabilising factor, while insurgent activity by Sunni militants continues in some parts of the province and has left tens of casualties behind so far.

The local office of the influential Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr organised a military parade on June 21 in which hundreds of armed Shia men walked through the streets in downtown Kirkuk.

“The parade was meant to send a couple of messages. One was a message of reassurance to all Iraqis that there are soldiers to defend all segments of the people,” says Sheikh Raad al-Sakhri, the local representative of Sadr, sitting on the floor of his well-protected Khazal al-Tamimi mosque. “And the other was a message to terrorists that there is another army ready to fight for the sake of the country if the [official] military [forces] fall short of their duties.”

Al-Sakhri might claim his men will protect everyone, but the Sunni Arabs here are not convinced.

At the peak of Iraq’s sectarian strife in 2006 and 2007, Sadr’s Mahdi Army was seen as responsible for summary execution of thousands of Sunnis in the capital Baghdad and other areas.

“A question for the local government [in Kirkuk] is will it allow Sunni Arabs to carry out a similar (military) parade,” says Massoud Zangana, a former human rights activist turned businessman, who alleges he has been threatened with death by Shia armed groups.  “The number of Sunni Arabs is more than the Shia in this city.”

Zangana owns a television channel called Taghyir – Arabic for ‘Change’ – that broadcasts from Amman, Jordan, which some Iraqis refer to as the “Revolution Channel” for its steady coverage of Sunni protests two years ago and of the current fight between Sunni militants and the Iraqi army.

Local media are also buzzing with reports that the central government in Baghdad has delivered a couple of arms’ shipments via the city’s airport to Shia militiamen here.

Officials in Kirkuk or Baghdad have not confirmed those reports.

“Giving weapons to official security forces is okay but providing arms to one side to fight the others is wrong,” says Mohammed Khalil Joburi, a Sunni Arab member of the Kirkuk Provincial Council, wishing that the news of arm deliveries is not true.

The local government in Kirkuk is run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a major Kurdish party that has close relationship with Iran. Many in the local media speculate that the PUK-controlled administration in Kirkuk had possibly agreed to the military display by Shia groups under pressure from Iraq’s powerful eastern neighbour, Iran.

Despite the appearance of relative calm, tensions are high in Kirkuk and security forces are visible throughout the city.

By appearing to favour Shia armed elements, Kurds might risk alienating the local Sunni Arabs and potentially push them toward cooperation with ISIS and other militant Sunni factions.

In Bashir, a village in southern Kirkuk populated by Shia Turkmen, local Shia militias and Kurdish Peshmerga forces have clashed with ISIS and other Sunni militant groups.

In the western part of the province around Hawija district, the Kurdish Peshmerga have repeatedly fought against ISIS and its local allies.

Kirkuk has not been spared suicide attacks, a trademark of ISIS and jihadist groups.

On June 25, a suicide attack killed at least five people and injured around two dozen others.

The challenge before Kurds who effectively rule most parts of the province is to prevent a spillover of violence and sectarian divisions in other parts of the country into Kirkuk.

Kurds view Kirkuk as part of their homeland, Kurdistan, and hope they can maintain their current military and political dominance in the city.

In the latest Iraqi parliamentary elections in April, Kurds won eight out of the 12 parliamentary seats allocated to the province.

Kirkuk’s vast oil fields have the capacity to produce around half a million barrels of oil per day and Kurds consider Kirkuk central to their aspirations to build an independent state.

Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region, recently said that he will deploy as many forces as needed to maintain Kurdish control of the contested province. 

On June 30, Barzani asked the head of United Nations Mission to Iraq to organise a referendum in which Kirkuk’s residents can decide whether they want to be part of the Kurdistan Region.

The official territory of the Kurdistan Region includes Erbil, Sulaimaniya and Dohuk provinces.

But after the Iraqi military’s recent defeat at the hand of ISIS-led Sunni militant groups, Kurds have expanded their control over large parts of the neighbouring Kirkuk, Nineveh, Diyala and Salahaddin provinces.

Now in charge of Kirkuk, the challenge for Kurds is walking a fine line between Shia and Sunni, Arab and Turkmen populations to maintain order in the medium and long term.

In a deeply-divided city facing the threat of jihadists close by, Kirkuk’s Shia and Sunni leaders who spoke to IPS appeared to have no objection to Peshmerga’s control of Kirkuk, at least in the short term.

In the heart of the city’s historic citadel, Rashid and his young men are well aware of the difficult task lying ahead. “We are here to protect all groups … We don’t wish to fight but this area is surrounded by ISIS and all sorts of other groups,” says Rashid.

“We don’t know what their goal is, but we are on alert here.”

Kurds in Diyarbakir: a generation lost in conflict. Credit: Brian Dell/Wikipedia

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

Eighteen months after a ceasefire between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkey’s security forces took effect, clouds of trouble are gathering in the country’s south-east.

In early June, a series of violent events in the area that surrounds the key Kurdish city of Diyarbarkir gave a wake-up call to a nation, which for a year and a half was being reluctantly persuaded that its 30-year-long inter-ethnic conflict was on its way to a durable settlement.

After two weeks of unrest in regional towns, initiated by PKK supporters, the death on June 7 of a demonstrator has revived resentment towards the state.

This is an unwelcome development for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which has been trying to convince the large Kurdish minority of the country that its ethnic identity will be officially recognised, and to which, consistent with international conventions and European Union (EU) law, human rights will be conferred.The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

The recent deployment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the zone that extends from eastern Syria to north-western Iraq now provides a clear warning that the status of the Kurds in Turkey needs urgent and consistent attention by Ankara.

On January 3, 2013, the Turkish government began a series of indirect contacts with PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life imprisonment sentence for subversive activities that have so far cost the life of 40,000 Kurdish fighters, security forces and civilians.

Although behind bars in solitary confinement on an island off the coast of Istanbul since 1999, Ocalan has remained the de facto leader of PKK, an organisation that has been listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

In 2006, Ocalan entered into discrete talks with the Turkish authorities, promoting dialogue rather than violence from both sides. He also advocated an autonomous status for the Kurdish-majority populated region of Turkey’s south-east, instead of the creation of an independent state, which had been the aspiration of his movement since 1978.

But these talks went nowhere and in 2010 the dialogue stopped. PKK leaders in exile on the mounts that separate Turkey from northern Iraq resumed armed assaults against state security units. They demonstrated on a number of occasions that they had improved their warfare capabilities on a larger scale than in past operations.

The initiative in January 2013 to find a negotiated, rather than military, solution to the conflict therefore met the interests of the government and of the political branch of PKK. For the first time, ethnic Kurds who are elected members of the Turkish parliament were allowed to visit Ocalan and carry his views and recommendations back to Ankara.

The shuttling between Ankara and the island of Imrali, where Ocalan is guarded by more than 1,000 counter-terrorism troops, has resulted so far in 18 such exchanges. on April 25, 2013, the military arm of the PKK agreed to suspend harassment of the Turkish security forces and launched the withdrawal of armed PKK fighters from Turkish territory to the neighbouring Qandil mountains, which fall within the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous province of Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan seized the political opportunity to label the unofficial talks between the parties a ‘Peace Process’. The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

Similarly, the more nationalistic amongst the Kurds are suspicious of the government’s intentions, which they associate with mere quest for short-term political gain by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party ahead of the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections, in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Although the ‘Peace Process’ has generated strong activity, through round table discussions, consultative committees, and the involvement of civil society and the media in public debate, there has been no substantive progress in addressing the true issues that are core to the Kurdish grievances.

But, since August last year, the PKK commanders in exile seem to have changed their stance. Disillusioned with the lack of tangible developments, they have resumed recruiting young Kurds who may constitute an enlarged fighting force if the vision of autonomy does not take flesh.

The events since the beginning of June are deemed to be part of the manifestation of this attitude.

Observers in the past two weeks have also begun questioning the actual status of the process, and the true motives of the parties.

It is obvious that the prospect of a peaceful solution of the Kurdish problem provides a strong card to a government before impending elections, in respect to both ethnic Kurds and Turks.

The concessions to be made and rights to be granted to the Kurdish community are, on the other hand, a double-edged sword. Opinion polls have in recent months shown that the opposed parties are rather firm in their positions. Changing the status of the Kurds by decree is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Turks.

The resolution of the Kurdish problem can, therefore, only take root in a new Constitution, which should address the sensitive issues of minorities, equal citizenship and human rights.

To date, timid attempts to revise the 1980 Constitution, written under the auspices of military coup, have brought no fruits, mainly because they have approached the issue as a tinkering rather than as overhauling exercise.

A fundamentally new Charter, inspired by modern constitutional concepts, is unlikely to be attempted before the 2015 parliamentary elections. This time gap may have serious implications for the disposition and goodwill of ethnic Kurdish public opinion.

The increasingly assertive stance of KRG with respect to Baghdad’s authority, manifested a fortnight ago through oil exports via Turkey unauthorised by Iraq’s central government, and the occupation on June 12 by KRG soldiers of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, nominally within Baghdad’s jurisdiction but over which Iraq Kurds have territorial claims, may be flares fired across the bow of the Iraqi ship that mark the intention of KRG’s leadership to proceed with full independence in a not so distant future.

Signalling of such intention is likely to provide ammunition to the separatists in the neighbouring countries: Syria, Iran and Turkey, whose ethnically Kurdish inhabitants form a society of 30 to 35 million people. Turkish ethnic Kurds represent approximately one-third of this group.

KRG’s ambitions are currently enhanced by the occupation on June 10 of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by ISIS, a Sunni jihadist organisation affiliated until recently with Al Qaeda.

KRG has used ISIS’s aggression as a justification to annex Kirkuk, in order to spare it from jihadist rule. As the central Iraqi government is weak and its army in decomposition, it is unlikely that KRG will ever return Kirkuk to its former status.

According to experts in the fossil energy industry, the combined revenues from its own and Kirkuk’s oil production would endow KRG with enough financial resources to survive as an independent state. Political analysts in the region already speculate that in such a scenario, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel may eventually support the creation of a stand-alone Kurdistan, granting it legitimacy and status.

An outcome of this kind bears high probability that Turkish, Iranian and Syrian ethnic Kurds will be tempted to join their cousins of northern Iraq and get a taste of the prosperity that comes with petro-dollars, although KRG leaders will most likely temporarily dissuade such a rush to transnational independence movements in their region.

KRG needs Turkey at present, and may need Syria in the future, for its oil exports and economic viability.

Mosul refugees just arrived at the newly set up camp in Khazar. Credit: Jewan Abdi/IPS

By Jewan Abdi
KHAZAR, Iraq, Jun 15 2014 (IPS)

“People with long beards and dressed like Afghans broke into our neighbourhood after they had bombed it. We were lucky to escape from that nightmare,” Aum Ahmad, a46-year-old woman from Mosul – 400 km northwest of Baghdad – told IPS from the recently set up Khazar refugee camp, 25 km east of the besieged city.

“The fighters spoke classic Arabic to each other so it was obvious to everyone that they were from outside Iraq,” she added, while striving to organise her belongings inside the blue tent she and her family will have to share with fellow refugees.

They are just a few among the 500,000 that, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), have left Mosul in recent days after the city was taken over by Sunni insurgents on June 10.

An estimated 300,000 of them [refugees from Mosul] are reportedly seeking shelter in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the closest thing to a state of their own the Kurds have ever had, and which has remained almost untouched by the on-going violence in the rest of the country.An estimated 300,000 of them [refugees from Mosul] are reportedly seeking shelter in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the closest thing to a state of their own the Kurds have ever had, and which has remained almost untouched by the on-going violence in the rest of the country.

However, only those with family members or sponsors who can provide accommodation are allowed to enter Erbil, the administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, 390 km north of Baghdad.

Samia Hamoud,a 48-year-old mother of eight children, was not lucky enough to be among the latter. She says she will stay in the camp because she is worried about her children´s safety.

“My street was full of bodies but nobody could retrieve them back because of the snipers,” recalls Hamoud, who said that she lost her husband in the shelling of Nabi Yunus district, on the eastern bank of the Tigris river which bisects the city.

Many sources are giving full credit for the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a Jihadi group formerly linked to Al Qaeda that is today claiming territory in both countries.

However, Hamoud described the assailants as ”Sunni militiamen in plain civilian clothes.”

“They were well organised. On our way out, they were manning checkpoints and checking people´s passports and IDs through laptops with an internet access. I guess they were looking for men who had any relation with the Iraqi security forces,” she added.

Hamoud´s testimony does not bear out the theory that gives full credit to ISIS for the victory in Mosul.

The governor of the city, Atheel al Nujaifi, also escaped when militants attacked Mosul. Speaking from Erbil, he told IPS that there are also groups “other than ISIS” behind the attack and that a “Sunni-armed group should be set up to fight the extremists.”

“The Iraqi Sunnis were the first victims of Al Qaeda-linked groups just after the invasion in 2003,” underlined the senior official, who hopes for a decentralised Iraq.

Alongside other cities in Western Iraq, Mosul also hosted massive demonstrations from December 2012 until March 2013. Iraq´s Sunni population is variously estimated to be between 20 and 40 percent of Iraq’s population of 32 million. They have been complaining of increasing marginalisation by the predominantly Shia political leaders.

Ghanim Alabed was one of the most visible faces of the protests in Mosul. The 40-year-old accountant had moved to Erbil in April after the demonstrations dragged the west of the country into unprecedented chaos since the peak of sectarian violence between 2006 and 2008.

“The fall of Mosul is the victory of the revolution,” Alabed told IPS Saturday from his residence in Erbil. “It has been thanks to a joint operation by Islamic groups such as Ansar al-Sunna, the Mujahideen Army, but also the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order (JRTN), a group set up in 2006 after the execution of Saddam Hussein, and allegedly commanded by Izzat Ibrahim al Duri, a top military commander and a vice president in the Hussein government. In fact, Mosul was the country´s last stronghold for the Baath party of Iraq´s ousted ruler Saddam Hussein.

Alabed ensured that many of the refugees who had left Mosul are now back, and that roadside blocks across the city have been removed so that locals can move “freely and unmolested.”

“They are celebrating victory back home after getting rid of Maliki´s occupation forces,” said Alabed, adding that he is planning to go back to his native Mosul “in the forthcoming days.”

Many analysts still wonder how a city of two million could fall just in a few hours. Local Sunni insurgent groups had never shown such power since the country´s invasion. On the other hand, ISIS fighters have struggled in vain to take over much smaller Kurdish villages in northeast Syria for over two years.

Salem, a former soldier who did not want to disclose his full name, shared his own experience:

“We were betrayed by our own captains and commanders. When we realised they had all left, we changed our uniforms for plains clothes and followed suit,” the 35-year-old told IPS while he queued in Erbil for a flight ticket to Baghdad.

Salem had served in Mosul for over three years and, as most of the soldiers deployed in Iraq´s predominantly Sunni west, he is also Shiite. He said he could not figure out whether the attackers were ISIS fighters or local Sunni militants.

“Why should I bother to defend a community that hates us?” added the former soldier from Samawa – 260 km southeast of Baghdad. “In fact, I reckon many people in Mosul are very happy about all this.”

Syrian-Iraqi border post in Til Kocer. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
TIL KOCER, Syria, May 18 2014 (IPS)

“We all know that Ankara and Erbil have a joint plan to evacuate the entire region,” Abdurrahman Hemo, head of the Kurdish Humanitarian Aid Committee tells IPS. “They want to choke the people here until they flee en masse.”

From his office in Derik, 700 km northeast of Damascus, Hemo denounces a blockade allegedly enforced by the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq and Turkey over the Kurdish areas of Syria.

“The latest proof of this is the ditch that Erbil (the administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan) is building along their common border,” notes the Kurdish official.

The “ditch” is a 17 km-long trench, three metres wide and two deep, which comes on top of the recent dismantling of the bridge across the Habur river, at the only official border crossing between the Kurds of Iraq and Syria.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda affiliate groups, many of which are reportedly reaching the area through the Turkish border, have been maintaining a siege on the region since autumn 2012.

“People are terrified and many have left,” Isham Ahmed, Derik resident, points out from his small grocery store in the bazaar. The shopkeeper, who refuses to fold his business despite the hardship, adds that food prices have increased fivefold because much is now smuggled, or simply because crops are unattended because of the war.

Shortages of virtually everything are seemingly one of the prices to pay for the Syrian Kurds since they took over their areas in July 2012. Despite distancing itself from both government and opposition, Ankara still frowns on the Democratic Union Party, the dominant party among the Syrian Kurds, with an ideology akin to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

On the other hand, the Erbil authorities accuse the new Syrian Kurdish administration of politically marginalising a significant part of the population. The excellent trade relations between Ankara and Erbil, which include significant gas and oil contracts, may also be a factor behind Erbil’s refusal to recognise the new status quo among their kin in Syria’s north.

Meanwhile fuel in Derik has gone from the pre-war 50 Syrian pounds per litre (25 euro cents) up to 300. Petrol is brought from the myriad of makeshift refineries dotting the flat landscape; basically drums where the raw crude is distilled, and where individuals, often children, work under constant danger of explosion.

Not surprisingly, vehicle engines collapse due to the poor quality of the fuel and many have to be towed to Qamishli, the main urban settlement in Syria’s Jazeera region, 600 km northeast of Damascus.

Qamishli is very much an outsider in the war-torn country. Most of this city of 200,000 is under Kurdish rule but the government is still present in the city centre and the airport. That means two parallel administrations giving their back to each other. Rauda Hassan, co-mayor of the city with her counterpart Moaz Abdulkarim – the local Kurds scrupulously follow gender parity– briefs IPS on the city’s new challenges:

“The main electricity line used to come from Raqqa (500 km northeast of Damascus) but not any longer because the city is under Al Qaeda control. In Qamishli, both the regime buildings and the airport enjoy 24 hours of power but it is just four for the rest of us so we rely on power generators,“ explains the 30-year-old official from the former Hadaya hotel, today hosting the Kurdish city council.

A few hundred metres away, and without leaving the city centre, doctor Redovan Hamid also strives to meet the growing demands of his patients.

“The lack of electricity affects the preservation of food but that’s far from being the main problem. We are facing cases of tuberculosis and there are areas in the city where garbage is not collected so we have to be prepared for the worst: a plague of rats, a cholera outbreak,” he points out. He also puts the blame on a “blockade enforced by Ankara and Erbil.”

“Medicines are scarce, or obsolete after being held in the Turkish or Kurdish Iraqi borders for too long. It’s outrageous,” adds the doctor.

From the headquarters of the Kurdish Red Crescent – an organisation set up in the heat of the revolution but with no structural relationship with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent – regional delegate Agid Brahim subscribes to Hamid’s version.

“We rely exclusively on the international community because our neighbours have given us nothing but their backs,” he told IPS.

“Syria thanks your visit”

Yet there might be a small hint of hope. On October 26 last year, forces of the YPG (People’s Protection Units) seized control of the Syrian-Iraqi border post in Til Kocer (Yarubiya in Arabic), 700 km northeast of Damascus and 400 km northwest of Baghdad.

The strategic spot, a main hub for trading between both countries for decades, had remained under control of Al Qaeda affiliate groups since March 2013.

The next step was to resume operations between both sides, something which happened in late December, after a Kurdish delegation met officials in Baghdad. But cross-border traffic is still far from being fluid.

“Goods need to be shifted from one truck to another because they are still not allowed to cross the border,” Redur Marzan, one of the new customs officials at this massive, yet empty, border complex tells IPS.

Marzan talks of “just a few trucks a day” going through the painful process of shifting their load across the border. Safety, adds Marzan, is another key factor.

“Most of the shooting we hear during the day comes from a YPG training camp close by but the Islamists are still in the area so we cannot drop our guard, especially at night,” admits this Kurd in his late twenties while he strolls among tons of dates rotting on the ground.

A few metres behind him, a man in camouflage gear sweeps the main exit gate. On the other side of the fence, a solitary Iraqi soldier looks in boredom.

“Syria thanks your visit,” reads a sign over a border post that has yet to prove to be a real way out for a landlocked patch of land.

(END)

A Sutoro miliitaman holds his rifle in Derik in northeast Syria. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria , May 4 2014 (IPS)

Malki Hana says his men are afraid of cameras. “Most of them are army defectors and they may easily get in trouble,” says this commander of a mostly unknown armed group in Syria.

From his headquarters in Derik, 700 km northeast of Damascus, Hana, 34, briefs IPS on his militia comprising almost exclusively members of Syria’s Christian community.

“We started to organise ourselves as the regime pulled out from the northeast and the Kurds took over the region. Sutoro – ‘protection’ in Syriac language – is our alternative to the chaos gripping the country,” says the commander, a former mechanic.There are discordant voices within the community.

In July 2012 Syrian Kurds took control of regions in the north of the country where they are compact. So far they’ve managed to keep distance from both the government and the armed opposition.

Hana speaks of a “fluid collaboration” with Kurdish security forces. “We have just 100 fighters Derik but we are in full coordination with the Asayish – the Kurdish police – and we even conduct joint operations.”

Translators are sometimes necessary. “We do not speak Kurdish and some of them are Kurds from Turkey who do not speak Arabic,” he says.

Pre-war census figures suggested an Assyrian Christian population about 10 percent of the total population of 23 million.

The east has been a safe haven for Christians – especially those fleeing the war in neighbouring Iraq. But many parts of Syria have turned into a lethal trap for non-Muslim minorities.

The United Nations says more than two million Syrians have fled the country since March 2011. It is uncertain how many of them have been Christians.

Many Christians have reportedly sided with the Damascus regime of President Bashar Assad during the crisis, but there are discordant voices within the community.

Among these is the Syriac Union Party (SUP) established in 2005. It remained underground until the new scenario in the northeast allowed them to surface in places like Qamishli, 600 km northeast of Damascus.

SUP chair Isoue Geouryie laments that many of his kin have vowed for “security” rather than “rights”.

“Both Hafez Assad (former president and father of the current president) and his son denied us our legitimate rights because they did not even recognise the existence of the Syriac people in Syria,” Geouryie tells IPS.

He says he has no fear of reprisals even though many of his party members are in prison.

Easter processions in Qamishli are famous all over Syria. But the political situation here is unparalleled: government forces are still in control of the airport and the city centre, where portraits of the Assads, including a large statue of Hafez, remain untouched. The suburbs and the rest of the northeastern Jazeera region remain under Kurdish control.

Geouryie says he prefers the latter. “One of the most important steps that we have recently taken was to declare our autonomy and release a social contract that recognises our (Syriac) language as co-official along with Kurdish and Arabic.”

In late January this year, Jazeera declared its own autonomous provincial government which includes Kurdish, Arab and Syriac representatives.

Geouryie sees the Sutoro as “a necessary and legitimate body” although he draws a line between “those who work hard alongside the Kurds, and those who still support the regime.”

At the militia headquarters in the west of Qamishli, local commander Luey Shamaaon puts the full number of Sutoro militiamen “around 400”. He confirms the existence of a fellow Christian group aligned with Assad.

This split came seven months ago. “The regime arrested several of our men but we managed to exchange them for some guards we captured at their checkpoints,” recalls this 33-year-old Syriac. He insists that the “real” Sutoro is his group, “and not the others.”

According to local information, Christian militias allegedly loyal to Assad boast a different logo and identify themselves on their uniforms and their vehicles as “Sootoro”. Given the constant refusal of the Syrian government to grant a visa to this reporter, the only way into Qamishli was after crossing the border from the Iraqi Kurdish region without consent from Damascus. IPS was therefore unable to check such information about other Christian militias independently.

“Of course we have contact with them but only at a personal level. When I take off my uniform I can talk politics with anyone, and in a most civilised way,” a Sutoro militiaman who didn’t want to disclose his name told IPS.

Despite the ongoing conflict, it is evident in downtown Qamishli that ties remain in place among the local Christian community with differing loyalties.

Lara, a 21-year-old Christian university student says at one of the many Internet cafes in town that she feels comfortable with the Sutoro and their Kurdish allies.

“Were it not for the YPG (Kurdish acronym for ‘People’s Protection Units’ run by Kurds), Islamists would have wiped us out all long ago,” she tells IPS. Al-Qaeda linked groups, many of them entering the area through the Turkish border, have maintained a siege on the region since autumn 2012.

Other Christians at the cafe distance themselves from the Sutoro. “Sutoro has appointed itself as a defence body for the Christians but none of us asked them to do so,” says Maryam. “As far as I know, Assad’s forces are the only legitimate armed forces in Syria.”

She is struggling to chat online with a relative in Sweden. “Most of my family is there now,” she adds with a sad smile.

There are conflicts old and new crying for solution and reconciliation, not violence, with reasonable, realistic ways out.

Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s box? More Pandora.

There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

Take the Maghreb-Mali+ complex: a road to peace runs through Tuareg high autonomy and confederations of the autonomies, in addition to the state system. Proceeds from natural resources – oil, uranium, gold, metals – should benefit the owners, not former colonisers. The United Nations’ task is to make the West comply with socioeconomic human rights.

Take what is called the last colony (well, Ulster? Palestine?): Sahrawi, Spain’s shame for not having decolonised; the United Nations Charter Article 73 formula is not perfect but differential treatment is unacceptable.

Take Ceuta and Melilla, “Spanish” enclaves in Morocco, and Gibraltar, an “English” enclave in Spain: use the Hong Kong formula with sovereignty for the owners, flag and garrison, and leave the system as it is.

Geography and history matter; sovereignty for one, system for the other. Not a bad formula for the Falkland/Malvinas islands or Northern Ireland, with a reborn Republic of Ireland in a Confederation of British Isles.

Back to Berlin 1884, institutionalising the outrageous sociocide, with genocide and ecocide, perpetrated on Africans on top of centuries of Arab-West slavery. But do not forget the Congress of Berlin six years earlier, in 1878, doing the same to the Balkans, with the infamous Article 25 giving the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, the right to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina temporarily.

On Oct. 6, 1908 they did exactly that, Turkey and Russia both being weak. What do you expect when annexing someone’s land? A resistance movement of course, and ultimately, on Jun. 28, 1914, the sacred date to the Serbs, having been defeated by the Turks 525 years earlier: Two shots rang out in Sarajevo.

One century later “historians” (who pay their salaries, states?) see the shots as the cause of World War I, not what caused the shots; like seeing the terrorists, not what causes terrorism.

Then as now the same two stories, nations made prisoners of states, and states-peoples made prisoners of empires. Sarajevo used against terrorism.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to dismantle the beaten Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires; but not the victors’ empires as a young Vietnamese in Paris experiences, chased away from the U.S. Embassy: Ho Chi Minh, claiming the same for his people.

And the U.S. Versailles delegation rejected that claim by Sudeten Germans against Czechoslovakia; accepted by England, not to “appease” Adolf Hitler, but to rectify a wrong.

What a fantastic chance for German-Austrian foreign policy!

Start this 2014 centenary year preparing 150 anniversary conferences, in 2028 and 2034, apologising for 1914, undoing some harm, letting Africans be Africans and Balkans be Balkans of various kinds, stop blaming their victims for being unruly, restless, terrorist and so on. The peaceful century 1815-1914: some peace! Don’t miss the chance.

But they were not alone. In 1905 the U.S.-Japan, Taft-Katsura (later president and prime minister, respectively) agreed to U.S. rule in the Philippines and Japanese rule in Korea, in the interest of “peace in East Asia” – their peace, meaning rule. A good century later the Obama-Abe (president and prime minister, respectively) uneasy agreement on Japan’s aggressive policy.

The solution to the Korean Peninsula conflict is a peace treaty and normalisation with North Korea, a Korean nuclear free zone and work on the open border-confederation-federation-unitary state continuum.

If the U.S. fails to go along, why not go ahead, also multilaterally and via United Nations.

But they were not alone: in 1917 Balfour Jewish homeland followed the Sykes-Picot treason with four disastrous colonies. With a major difference, however: the Jews had been there before; some title to some land, but not to an ever-expanding Jewish state (just one word away from “only Jewish”).

The road to peace must pass through a pre-1967 Israel with Jewish characteristics, Palestine recognised, a Middle East Community of Israel with border countries, an Organisation for Cooperation and Security in West Asia, with Syria (an upper chamber for the many nations with cultural autonomy – Ottoman millet), Iraq (maybe confederation, with no U.S. bases), the Kurds (autonomy in the four countries for some land, a confederation of autonomies), Iran (an end to Benjamin Netanyahu extremism), a moderate Israel, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection.

Afghanistan? Full U.S.-NATO withdrawal, an end to foreign bases, coalition government, Swiss-style constitution with much autonomy for villages and nations, and gender parity. But let Afghans be Afghans.

China’s claims on sea and air space? Too much, but the Chinese had been there before, 500-1500; some title to some sea, some air.

And U.S.-China: direct cooperation for mutual benefit, make it more equal; the U.S. is cheating itself, building warehouses, not factories.

U.S. spying on the world: the point is not clemency for Edward Snowden but to drop the NSA and punish those, also allies, who violated human rights.

The West tries to claim the moral high ground by changing discourse to something they think they have and others do not: democracy. Running a huge colonial-imperial system against the will of others? Some democracy.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Despite an atmosphere of deep mutual distrust, two major rival Syrian Kurdish bodies have agreed to attend an expected international conference on the fate of Syria, known as Geneva II, on the side of the Syrian opposition forces, Syrian Kurdish sources told IPS.

That is contingent on the possibility that only two sides will be allowed to sit at the negotiating table: the government of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition groups.

Although the decision represents a significant change of direction on the part of the deeply-divided Syrian Kurds, there are serious doubts as to whether the agreement between the Western Kurdistan People’s Council (WKPC) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) will actually be implemented.

While the WKPC is perceived to have some sort of understanding with Assad’s regime, the KNC is close to the rest of the Syrian opposition groups.

The Geneva II conference, scheduled to be held on Jan. 22, is backed by the western powers, Russia, the United Nations and the Arab League.

The international community hopes that the conference will pave the way for an interim government and end the bloody conflict in Syria that has claimed over 100,000 lives so far, according to U.N. figures.

There is no concrete agreement yet on whether Syrians will take part in the conference in the form of two or more negotiating groups.

But if there will be more than two Syrian sides at the Geneva II conference, then Kurds will seek to participate as a separate independent bloc, IPS has learned from Syrian Kurdish sources.

“Geneva II is an important station where the future of Syria will be determined,” Abdulsalam Ahmed, the co-chairperson of the WKPC, told IPS.

He was in Erbil for eight days of intense talks with KNC representatives over participation in the Geneva conference and a possible power-sharing deal between the two Kurdish bodies to administer the Kurdish territories of Syria.

The WKPC is close to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose military wing, known as the People’s Defence Units (YPG), controls much of the Kurdish areas in the northern and northeastern parts of Syria.

“As Kurds we are an important actor on the ground and need to be represented,” added Ahmed, who warned that the Syrian crisis cannot be resolved until the Kurdish question is addressed.

For Kurds, the Geneva II conference bears more significance than merely an attempt to end Syria’s civil war, which they have largely managed to avoid getting involved in.

It has resurrected memories of rather similar international gatherings in France’s Sevres and Switzerland’s Lausanne at the turn of the last century that brought about disastrous results for Kurds and subjugated them to the harsh rule of governments in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

“Geneva II, as an international gathering, is a new Sevres [Treaty in 1920 in France] and Sykes-Picot [treaty], and we cannot afford to be absent from that meeting,” said Nuri Brimo, a leading official of the KNC, much of whose senior leadership is based outside Syria, mostly in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sykes-Picot was a treaty between Britain and France to draw the map of the new Middle East after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.

“Syria will either survive as a united country or be further fragmented after the conference… In any case, we will have to be present there,” added Brimo.

“Our message to the international community is that we as the second-largest ethnicity in Syria want our rights to be recognised… We don’t want Syria to be fragmented. We need to be a major player in the Syrian equation and the country’s future.”

Syria’s Kurdish politics

The Kurdish political scene in Syria is deeply fragmented and highly complex. The WKPC and KNC each represent a number of often loosely-allied groups. The two bodies have been at odds with each other since the start of the Syrian uprising nearly three years ago and often trade harsh accusations over the other side’s loyalties and agenda.

The KNC charges that the WKPC and its major component, PYD, have struck a deal with Assad’s government and as such have betrayed the opposition’s cause of toppling Assad.

Until the March 2011 uprising, the Assad regime denied Syrian Kurds basic cultural and ethnic rights, and tens of thousands of them were even denied citizenship.

The root of suspicions toward the PYD lies in the manner of its military takeover of the Kurdish areas of Syria in the summer of 2012.

While the PYD and its supporters claim they “liberated” those areas following military confrontations with the Syrian army and security forces, the KNC and Syrian opposition groups say Assad handed over control of those areas to the PYD in order to use his troops to fight rebel groups in other parts of the country.

They argue that as Turkey’s support for Syrian rebel groups, including Islamists, increased, Assad conceded de facto control of much of the Syrian Kurdish regions to the PYD in an effort to counterbalance Turkish intervention in Syrian affairs.

The PYD is widely seen as close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, that has been fighting the Turkish government for Kurdish rights for around three decades.

PYD and WKPC supporters, on the other hand, are quick to point out that the KNC is close to the Sunni-Arab dominated Syrian opposition groups, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Masoud Barzani.

The non-Kurdish Syrian opposition groups are largely loath to state their position vis-à-vis Kurdish rights in the future Syria.

The PYD also accuses the KNC of advancing the agendas of Barzani and Turkey and not the genuine interests of Syrian Kurds.

This state of deep divisions and mistrust that has overshadowed the intra-Syrian Kurdish relations has led many Syrian Kurds not to place much hope on any deal between the WKPC and the KNC.

In the past, small skirmishes have taken place between PYD forces and supporters of parties within the KNC ranks, resulting in some casualties.

“The situation [after the recent Erbil talks] is going to be like before. The conflict between them [i.e. PYD and KNC] continues,” said Siruan H. Hussein, a Syrian Kurdish journalist and director of ARTA FM, a community radio station based in the predominantly Kurdish town of Amuda in Syria.

“The PYD is not going to share military power and financial resources and… control of the self-rule administration with the KNC.”

The PYD recently declared the establishment of an autonomous administration to manage the areas under its control.

Despite the rising fortunes of al-Qaeda-allied Islamist forces in Syria, the PYD has successfully battled those groups and wrestled control of chunks of territory from them.
As many parts of Syria have experienced heavy devastation as a result of the conflict there, PYD-controlled areas have been spared much of the destruction.

At Qamishli’s women centre, everyone is inspired by Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria, Nov 4 2013 (IPS)

“I got married when I was 14 and I already had four children at 20,” recalls Nafia Brahim. In her fifties now, she is working hard so that no other woman loses control of her life.

Brahim is one of 12 members of the assembly that runs the Centre for Training and Empowerment of Women in Qamishli, 680 kilometres northeast of Damascus. Theirs is a multidisciplinary action.

“We organise sewing and computer workshops for women but we also teach the illiterate to read and write in Kurdish language, we have gymnastics for the pregnant… all run by and for women,” Brahim tells IPS.

The most sought after course is called ‘women and rights’."We are not going to waste our first opportunity ever to get our rights."

“The emancipation of women begins when each of us finally understands that we actually have the right to emancipate, to be an individual capable of leading our own lives,” says Brahim, with all the enthusiasm of someone who has just been through the process.

She knows it was far from easy. After the uprising of 2011 against the Syrian government, the country’s Kurds opted for a neutrality that has forced them into clashes with both government and opposition forces. In July 2012 they took over the areas where they form a majority, in Syria’s north.

Today, the role played by women in Syria’s Kurdish areas is tangible from the very leadership of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant party among Syrian Kurds.

“All of our organisations, social, political, military etc., are built up on quotas of 40 percent for women, another 40 percent for men and 20 percent for individuals regardless of their sex,” Asia Abdala, PYD co-chair tells IPS.

The reason, she says, is the “double” revolution of the Kurds in Syria.

“After suffering Damascus’s boot for decades, ours is a national struggle, but women liberation comes at the same time. We will not make the mistake of waiting until the war is over to achieve our rights,” declares Abdala.

There are now 16 centres to assist women, and three academies that seek to “eliminate the patriarchal mindset ruling society for thousands of years,” says the senior Kurdish leader.

Like the men, Kurdish women in Syria now wear the green overall of the newly created Kurdish police, or the blue one of the garbage collection service, or the camouflage uniform of the People’s Protection Units, a former militia turned into a proper army.

Local women are journalists in a warzone, and women teach long tabooed subjects.

“The liberation of society as a whole starts with the women gaining their freedom,” Ilham Ahmet, spokeswoman of the Democratic Society Movement (TEV DEM), an umbrella organisation for political parties as well as a large number of civil groups tell IPS.

“We are not going to waste our first opportunity ever to get our rights.”

Substantial progress has been made, but everyone at Qamishli’s women centre knows theirs will be an obstacle race.

“Since we set up this centre two years ago we have hosted more than 150 women. Most of them were fleeing an unwanted marriage, and many were just girls,” says 55-year-old assembly member Faiza Mahmud.

“N. Z. aged 15, married a man of 37 who beat her and took their son,” Mahmud reads from his register book. “R. T. 16, was raped and abandoned in Turkey by her 43-year-old husband…there are dozens of cases like these.”

“We offer legal and economic support to the victims and mediate with families to integrate them into a society that has rejected them,” recounts the oldest of the group next to a huge mural boasting the face of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“Ocalan has been the only leader in the Middle East that ever championed for the rights of women,” says Mahmud, showing a sympathy for the guerrilla movement that is openly shared by the TEV DEM as a whole.

Nuha Mahmud, 35, also a volunteer, says Arab and Christian women also arrive at the centre asking for help.

“We often have to mediate with the local diocese to ease a divorce. For Christians it’s much more complicated than for Muslims.”

Over the seven months she has been working here, Mahmud says she has attended a large number of victims of sexual violence.

“Many cases are terrible because women who have been raped in the Middle East are often rejected by their families, and sometimes even killed by them.” Unsurprisingly, many women will never admit publicly they have been sexual assaulted.

Her testimony is matched by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) report of May 2013. The FIDH is a group that brings together 178 members of human rights organisations in over 100 countries.

The report denounces the high number of violations in Syria both by government and by the opposition and it underlines that fear of rape is one of the main reasons women have to flee the country.

The report also concludes that “the social stigma attached to having been subject to sexual and other forms of gender-based violence is very strong in Syria.”

At 16, Aitan Hussein knows that well. The youngest among the centre’s volunteers is, her colleagues say, a “key player” when it comes to tackling abused teenagers.

“The partnership between women of different ages gives me a very ample view of what women have gone through,” says Hussein, who combines her work at the centre with her high school studies.

This early activist says she feels lucky because her family “will not impose any additional burden, or a marriage of any kind.” But comfort at is not enough.

“I simply couldn’t stand idly by while women around are still being abused,” says the young Kurdish woman. “We have to keep fighting until nothing like this ever happens again.”

A statue of Syrian President Bashar Assad still stands in Qamishli town. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria , Oct 31 2013 (IPS)

“The whole region is under control but be careful in the city centre,” says a Kurdish militiaman at the eastern gate of Qamishli, 600 km northeast of capital Damascus, confirming rumours about breaches in Syria’s relatively stable northeast.

Sandwiched between Turkey and Syria, this city of 200,000 is known for its large Christian processions at Easter, held almost simultaneously with the mass celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish and Persian new year. Qamishli is not only a melting pot of Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds and Arabs but also the place where the Syrian Kurd uprising had its origins.

It was March 2004 when rioting after a football match in Qamishli led to days of dissident protests in the Kurdish regions, as well as in Damascus and other cities with a significant Kurdish population.

Since the beginning of civil unrest in Syria in March 2011, its Kurds have vowed to take the “third way” – allying neither with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad nor with the insurgents. They took over areas in Syria’s northeast, where they are concentrated, in July 2012 but have been constantly involved in clashes with both sides as well as Islamist groups linked to al-Qaeda.Today Kurdish flags are almost ubiquitous in their region, but not in Qamishli’s city centre, where Assad's forces still hold sway and keep a tight grip on the airport.

Today Kurdish flags are almost ubiquitous in their region, but not in Qamishli’s city centre, where Assad’s forces still hold sway and keep a tight grip on the airport. A daily flight still connects Qamishli with the country’s troubled capital.

“There are 600 km between Qamishli and Damascus but overland journeys are no longer an option,” Hamid, a local gas trader, tells IPS at his shop.

“There are so many different factions on the way demanding a fee that the price of gasoline has gone from 15 Syrian pounds (13 cents) per litre up to 300 (2.60 dollars). They bring it every day from Banyas on the Mediterranean coast.”

Little wonder that local people have dusted off their bikes. The price of basic goods may not have gone up as dramatically, but most Qamishli residents are struggling to survive.

One day a window blind remains shut, or the mail does not arrive, or the examination results don’t come…all signs that yet another family is fleeing to join the ranks of 200,000 refugees in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, languishing in five refugee camps or in thousands of packed, shared flats.

Power cuts are constant, water supplies scarce and mobile phone communications are only available due to the proximity of Turkey. Virtually every Syrian alongside the northern border is a subscriber of one of the main Turkish telephone companies.

Suddenly, an automated SMS from the Syrian Ministry of Tourism pops out as a reminder that Syria did boast both of tourism and a reliable telephone company: “Welcome to Syria. Call 137 for tourist information or claims.”

“Even under these conditions we cannot complain,” says Hozan, a civil engineering student waiting for the war to end so that he can finish his studies in Damascus. “We’ve lost a lot but we have also made unprecedented moves.”

Hozan writes in his native Kurdish for a local newspaper. As a kid, his father taught him to write in a language that was banned under Assad’s rule.

The parallel revolution of the Kurds has also brought in Kurdish schools, community centres for women and effective administrative management, from the military to garbage collection, even if the garbage is sometimes burnt in the bed of the Jaghjaghah, the river which dissects the city from north to south.

Such order amid the chaos posed by war comes from the hands of countless volunteers such as those led by Hashim Mohamed, head of the Asayish, the Kurdish police. This former PKK fighter tells IPS that he has 4,000 men under his command and he even admits to a few cases of ill-treatment suffered by prisoners.

“Those cases happened at the beginning of the revolution because most of our people were untrained and we were all facing a completely new scenario,” recalls Hashim. “Today our prisons are closely monitored and no abuse of any kind has been reported.”

The existence of a government-run checkpoint just a few metres away fuels rumours of a secret truce between the PYD, the dominant party among Syrian Kurds, and President Bashar Assad. Senior PYD representatives have repeatedly denied such claims to IPS and the police chief commander follows suit.

“They do not come into our area and we don’t go into theirs. We simply ignore each other,” says Hashim Mohamed.

True or not, Bashar Assad still smiles from a big billboard at Qamishli’s post office. A few metres away stands a statue of Assad holding a Syrian flag. At his feet, militiamen dressed in black jump into the back of an armed 4X4 van. Were it not for the Syrian flag painted all over the vehicle’s body, one might have taken them for insurgents fighting the regime.

“Those are sabihas, civilians paid and armed by the regime at the beginning of the uprising,” says Edmon, a local Assyrian Christian activist siding with the opposition.

“Do not talk, do not look at them and hide your camera,” he advises.

While there is no permanent checkpoint, a random search could spell trouble for this IPS reporter in this part of the country with the consent of the Kurds, not of Damascus.

Leaving behind the main square, the once ubiquitous portraits of the Assad saga are no longer visible in store fronts, restaurants and windshields, but neither are the Kurdish flags. However, traffic policemen rest in cabins painted in the red, black and white colours of the Syrian flag.

Bazaar stalls are busy and local sweets made of honey and almonds are still popular in Qamishli’s many cake shops.

“The owner of that one is the brother of a well known opponent of the regime in Aleppo,” says Edmon, who “deeply” laments the divisions the crisis has created for Syria’s Assyrian community.

“Here we all know each other well, but nobody talks about politics in public,” It’s better to avoid problems.”

Redur Khalil: “Were it not for the Jihadists, the regime would have been toppled long ago.” Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria , Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

Kurdish fighters have emerged as a powerful player in the Syrian war thanks to the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG – “People’s Protection Units”), a seemingly well-organised armed group which has so far proved capable of defending the territory it claims in northern Syria.

IPS spoke to Redur Khalil at YPG headquarters in Qamishli in northeast Syria. A former Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighter with ten years of experience, Khalil – considered the public face of Kurdish resistance in Syria – has been a senior officer in the YPG since the start of the Syrian war.

About 40 million Kurds comprise today’s largest stateless nation. Numbering around three million in Syria, they are the biggest minority in the country, as many as the Alawites, the ethno-religious group of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Kurds are still in control of their areas in northern Syria, in a precarious balance between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Assad’s army. Nonetheless, the biggest threat towards stability in the areas where they are concentrated is posed by groups linked to Al Qaeda, several of which are allegedly backed by Turkey.

Q: What´s the current security situation in Kurdish-controlled areas?

A: Since Jul. 16 our forces have been constantly engaging in clashes with Al Qaeda-linked groups like Jabhat al Nusra and, especially, the ISIS – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – all across our territory.

These terrorist groups have not only killed and abducted Kurdish people and displaced civilians from their villages but also looted their properties, homes and places of work. After heavy clashes in areas like Afrin, 340 km north of Damascus, and Serekaniye, 506 km north of Damascus, we have pushed them down to Til Kocer, 840 km northeast of Damascus on the Syria-Iraq border.

Q: Many claim that Turkey has been funnelling jihadist cells across their border. What´s your take on that?

A: There´s no doubt about it. A few days ago we spotted them again coming from the Turkish border and we´ve even been attacked by Turkish artillery from their side. Two of our fighters were killed by gunfire from Turkish soldiers on the other side. But we also have a huge collection of IDs that belonged to fighters coming from Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrein… Many from Iraq and, so far, three from Turkey [he produces a pile of ID cards].

Q: But Assad´s presence in your areas is almost anecdotic. Why is there such a big presence of foreign fighters in the area?

A: It´s an unfortunate convergence of two agendas: Turkish chauvinism, which wants to boycott any step towards the recognition of the Kurdish people in Syria or elsewhere, and the Arab Islamists’ dream of an Islamic state.

We Kurds are caught in between those plans; we´re very much an obstacle for them so it´s actually us, and not the regime, that they´re fighting against now. We have suffered over 20 suicide attacks in the last 20 months.

Other than the foreigners, Assad also released prisoners from all over the country. Were it not for the Jihadists, the regime would have been toppled long ago.

Q: Do you have communication of any kind with such groups? And with Assad’s forces?

A: A few days ago we released some of their prisoners in exchange for the bodies of our martyrs. That´s all. As YPG we have no communication whatsoever with the Assad regime.

Q: Rumour has it that PKK fighters are flocking into Syria´s Kurdish areas to join your ranks.

A: It´s not true. Besides, we´re not waiting for them because we have clearly proved that we can manage the situation by ourselves. We have an army of 45,000 fighters, who have all gone through a 45-day training programme in the several camps across the Kurdish areas.

Q: Nonetheless, the PJAK – PKK’s counterpart in Iranian-controlled Kurdistan – has publicly said it wants to come and fight alongside your troops.

A: They are prepared to send their fighters, but as I said, we can handle the situation without any extra help. Both PKK and PJAK are welcome if they want to come, but for the time being we don´t really need them.

Q: Are there any non-Kurds within your ranks?

A: Indeed. A number of Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmens have joined us as well as men and women from all walks of life. Thirty-five percent of our fighters are women. We have lived together for centuries and they are an integral part of Kurdistan just as the Kurds are. YPG’s mission is to protect Western Kurdistan and all of its ethnic, national, and religious components.

Q: But there are also allegations that YPG is recruiting children.

A: Recruitment of conscripts under the legal age is completely rejected, it´s unacceptable and prohibited by the rules and regulations in force in this area.

Unfortunately, this did not prevent a few who did join voluntarily under the pressure of circumstances and through the neglect of some. In those few cases they were not allowed to participate in military operations and were not deployed in ‘hot’ areas. What I want to underline is that it was only actions of individuals, not of the system or the organisation as a whole.

Q: Kurdish opposition parties have accused you of indiscriminate use of force against protesters in the town of Amude, which resulted in the death of three activists last June.

A: We have videos, photos and documents that show that what happened in Amude was part of a conspiracy. Gunmen joined those protests and did not hesitate to shoot at a YPG convoy returning from a combat operation in the outskirts of Hasakah, 550 km northeast of Damascus. A member of the YPG, Sabri Gulo, was killed in that attack and two other fighters were injured.

Q: Where do you get funds and supplies?

A: We get support from the Kurdish Supreme Committee as well as from taxes collected at the borders under our control.

Q: Jabhat al-Akrad is also a Kurdish armed unit but not fighting alongside the YPG. What´s your relationship, if any, with them?

A: Jabhat al-Akrad was set up as a Kurdish unit that joined the FSA in Aleppo. But they´ve even engaged in clashes with them, when the Arab opposition attacked Kurdish areas. They´re also committed to the defence of the Kurdish land.

Q: How do you see the peace process between Ankara and Turkey´s Kurds?

A: As usual, the Kurdish side has moved forward whereas the Turks haven´t lifted a finger yet. Despite the obstacles, I strongly believe that peace will finally come and that issues between both sides will be settled. It´s not just one side but Turkish society as a whole that is demanding it. It may take longer than expected but I´m sure it will finally happen.

A group of Kurdish mourners bound for Syria board on the Iraqi shore. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
DERIK, Syria, Oct 13 2013 (IPS)

After fleeing the war three months ago, Gulnaz is headed back for Syria to bury her brother within the 24 hours Islam stipulates. But it is far from easy to take the coffin across the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Located 460 northwest of Baghdad, the Kurdish town Peshkhabur has witnessed unusual traffic of people over the last months. Most are refugees coming from Syria but there are also those forced to go back to the war-torn land they left behind. Gulnaz is devastated so it’s her companion who provides the details.

“After the Islamists’ offensive in July we moved to Erbil (the administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan 390 km north of Baghdad) but in pure bad luck her brother died in a car accident,” he tells IPS as they wait patiently for the Kurdish border officials on the Iraqi side to check their documents.Divided by the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, around 40 million Kurds comprise the world’s largest stateless nation.

The cluster of buildings from which cross-border traffic is managed hardly differs from customs offices elsewhere: baggage is thoroughly checked by men in uniforms while officials in plain clothes enter data in their computers behind their windows. About an hour later, it’s actually the absence of any new stamp on the passport which reveals the unique nature of this customs.

This is the border between the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq – the closest thing to a country that the Kurds have ever enjoyed- and the north-eastern region of Syria, which remains today under the control of the Syrian Kurds.

Divided by the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, around 40 million Kurds comprise the world’s largest stateless nation. Since the beginning of the uprising in March 2011, between three and four million Kurds there have opted for a neutral ‘third’ way – not with President Bashir Assad, and not with the Arab opposition.

It was not until July 2012 when they took over the areas where they are compact, in the country’s north and northwest. However, theirs is a fragile position which has led to clashes with both sides. The fiercest have been with groups linked to al-Qaeda reportedly supported by Turkey.

Turkey has openly said it does not look favourably on the creation of a new Kurdish political entity on its borders.

For the time being, neither Baghdad nor Damascus have any record whatsoever of the daily traffic of goods and people across the Habur river, which works as the natural border between both countries.

After paperwork on the Iraqi side, the mourners receive a paper with their name on it. That’s their passage into one of the two boats that cross the river.

The procession step aboard first to lay the coffin on the metal boat. Some of the men dressed in shal-e-sapik – the traditional Kurdish male dress- struggle to contain their tears. Two women channel their grief through a serkeftim, that syncopated Kurdish cry used to express both absolute joy or the deepest pain.

Gulnaz just covers her face with both hands while she’s guided to the boat.

“Things will be much easier when they finish building the bridge over the river,” says Sherwan, the boat pilot, pointing to the two yellow bulldozers already working on the Syrian shore.

A temporary pontoon bridge on the right is reserved for vehicles and oil transferred across the bridge through a set of hanging tubes. Nonetheless, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 30,000 people came across it during a massive refugee flow in August. The humanitarian agency estimates that the number of displaced Syrians on Iraqi soil is around 200,000.

The crossing is only a five-minutes ride over the calm waters of the Habur. On the other side, the baggage of the newcomers is searched by two young girls dressed in the uniform of the Asayish, the newly formed Syrian Kurdish police.

Chief commander of the police force Hasim Mohamed tells IPS that his is a body formed by 4,000 volunteers supplementing the 40,000 members of the YPG – the Kurdish initials for Popular Resistance Committees. This is very much a real army which has so far been able to contain the advance of Islamists in the region.

Much of its funding comes from this border traffic. Each passenger pays a fee of 1000 Syrian pounds (five euros) in the white cabin set up a few metres from the shore. Local officials say that between 150 and 200 people cross the river daily.

Those wishing to rest before jumping on one of the taxis waiting behind the last barrier can find a makeshift restaurant inside the annexed barracks. The local Kurds are getting on with business as usual in the difficult environment.

The mourners head for the funeral immediately. Others who crossed over make their own plans.

Massoud Hamid sits for tea before heading for his native town Qamishli, about 680 km northeast of Damascus. He is the driving force of Nû Dem, the first bilingual newspaper in Arab and Kurdish published in Syria. He’s returning after printing the latest edition in Erbil.

“We still have no real printers in Syrian Kurdistan, so we have to go back and forth every 15 days,” Hamid tells IPS. He recalls that he spent three years in jail after posting some pictures of children demonstrating in front UNICEF headquarters in Damascus.

He was arrested in 2004 while he was taking an exam at Damascus University but his bravery was recognised in 2005 by Reporters Without Borders. After his release, Hamid got asylum in France until conditions allowed him to return to his native Syria.

In Syria, he says, nothing will ever be as before.

“Today we had to go through the whole customs process customs but the truth is that both sides are Kurdish,” he says in the makeshift restaurant. “This is just one among so many forthcoming changes in the Middle East.”

Turkey’s new democratisation reform package may mark a step forward for civil rights, but it does not go far enough to ease social tension and feelings of mistrust that are afflicting the country, analysts say.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the long-awaited reform package on Sep. 30, saying it ushered in “a new, decisive phase” in Turkey’s democratisation process.

But after a summer during which Erdoğan’s reformist reputation was shredded by a violent police crackdown on anti-government protests, many Turks see the package mostly as an attempt to repair the prime minister’s battered image.

“The fact that this is being marketed as a big reform package is precisely because the government is seeing that they are failing on that front,” said Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a political columnist at Milliyet newspaper, an influential publication generally critical of the government. “It’s not enough, it’s hardly enough, but it’s a start.”

The measures, to be enacted through a mix of administrative and legislative changes, include the strengthening of minority language rights, the lifting of a ban on Islamic headscarves for women in public institutions, and alterations to the electoral system to benefit smaller political parties.

The package did not include widely anticipated enhancements of cultural and religious rights for Alevis, a Shi’a-Islam-influenced sect whose adherents comprise the country’s largest religious minority.

The bulk of the measures are aimed at addressing the grievances of Turkey’s 15 million ethnic Kurds, who have endured forced assimilation since the early years of the republic. The government currently is engaged in a peace process with the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose 30-year-long separatist insurgency has cost 40,000 lives. A ceasefire has held since March, with government officials holding direct talks with the PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan.

However, those talks have come to a standstill, with the rebels recently freezing a withdrawal from Turkey after accusing Ankara of failing to deliver on promised reforms.

On Sep. 30, Erdoğan announced that education in mother-tongue languages other than Turkish will be allowed for the first time, but only in private schools.

A ban on the letters q, w, and x, which are found in the Kurdish, but not the Turkish alphabet, will be lifted, allowing for their use in names and official documentation. Kurdish place names that were “Turkified” in the past will be restored to their original spelling.

Meanwhile, a “student oath,” which begins with the words “I am a Turk,” will be abolished in schools.

Erdoğan also proposed a debate on lowering the existing 10-percent threshold that a political party must clear in an election in order to secure seats in parliament. In many Western democracies, such as Germany, the threshold for representation is five percent of the popular vote. The high electoral barrier in Turkey has generally been seen as a means to stymy Kurdish political representation.

Overall, though, the reform measures fell short of several key Kurdish demands, including a loosening of the country’s draconian anti-terror laws. Many observers were also disappointed that Kurdish-language education will be restricted to private schools.

“Was this really a package worth waiting for?” asked Gültan Kışanak, co-chair of the main pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party in a televised statement.

“Kurds wished for the Kurdish problem to be solved, Alevis wished for freedom of religion, and other discriminated groups in Turkey wished for more participatory governance,” Kışanak continued. “It is not a package that responds to Turkey’s need for democratisation.”

Analysts interpreted the cautiousness of the measures as a sign of the government’s sensitivity over a possible Turkish nationalist backlash against Kurdish initiatives, particularly in the context of municipal and presidential elections next year.

“I think there’s been a growing unrest across the country since the peace talks began and the government began speaking to Öcalan directly,” said Ziya Meral, a London-based Turkey researcher, and former human rights advocate.

“It is not so much because of a lack of political will, but because elections are coming and the Turkish public is not necessarily on board with such a speedy resolution of the Kurdish issue.”

Hugh Pope, country director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, expressed a belief that the government’s fears are largely misplaced.

“This imaginary Turkish nationalist resistance to reform is very real in the mind of Ankara, but I don’t think it’s reflected on the ground,” Pope said. “Erdoğan is pushing through an open door, and the better he explains it, the easier this process will go.”

Meral believes that Erdoğan will likely announce further substantial reforms in the coming months as the elections draw nearer — especially on the Alevi issue.

“If you unveil all your major reforms in one go, the public will quickly forget, “ he drily noted, “but if you spread out the love a bit, your actions might be remembered much closer to the election date.”

The generally negative reception of the package from key opposition groups, including the Kurds, highlighted deeper social problems that the reforms did not address, he added.

Editor’s note: Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

A villager in the partially destroyed village of Ali Saray in Iraq. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
ALI SARAY, Iraq, Sep 7 2013 (IPS)

“The soul needs to reincarnate a thousand times before becoming one with god,” says Rajab Assy Karim from Ali Saray, 190 kilometres north of Baghdad. Iraq is full of “shortcuts” to the ultimate, and several seem to pass through this tiny desert village.

The few hundred people living in the adobe houses of Ali Saray are all Kakais, followers of an ancient pre-Islamic creed whose mere survival in this region in the 21st century is a miracle.

Karim knows this, and devotes most of his spare time to collecting books for the only library among the 12 Kakai villages clustered in this region.

“We are halfway between Tikrit – Saddam Hussein’s hometown and a stronghold of his supporters – and the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq,” says Karim. “The area is overrun by terrorists and we make one of their easiest targets.”“We live in the Middle East, where there is no democracy, no freedom of speech, where there are no rights..."

The rubble of the 13 houses destroyed in just this village this year bears witness to the violence local residents are subjected to. It is the price to pay for being Kurdish and “pagan” in one of Iraq’s most volatile areas.

Along with the Yezidis, another-pre-Islamic following, Kakais are said to have kept an original faith among Kurds. Kakaism is said to have derived from the Kurdish word Kaka (“elder brother”).

Kakais are reputed to be secretive about their beliefs. “They often accuse us of not revealing details about our faith but it is just a measure to protect ourselves from a hostile environment,” Jassim Rashim Shawzan, the first and only Kakai judge in Iraq, tells IPS.

“We live in the Middle East, where there is no democracy, no freedom of speech, where there are no rights…”

Shawzan says his people are originally from the Kurdish mountains of Iran near the city Kermansha, 400 kilometres southwest of Tehran. The area is dotted with Kakai spiritual shrines. It is where the only existing volume of the Zanur”, the sacred book of the Kakais, is kept.

After centuries of living among their Muslim neighbours, Kakais have adopted taboos such as not eating pork. But they still stand out.

Most Kakais are easily recognised by the often extreme moustaches they grow. Under Islamic practice, a moustache must be kept short and trimmed.

Shawzan also talks about a fasting period but, unlike the Muslim holy month, it lasts three days.

The judge says that post-Saddam Iraq is still far from being a country where the minorities’ constitutional rights are guaranteed.

“Saddam took away many of our lands and villages to relocate Arab families from other parts of the country. Since 2003 hundreds of us have been killed by extremists, and many were forced to move.”

The United Kingdom-based Minorities Right Group International estimates the number of Kakais in Iraq at 200,000. In a report in 2011 it condemned “threats, kidnappings and assassinations” in Kakai area. Some local Muslim religious leaders have reportedly ordered a boycott of “shops run by infidels.”

Today most Kakais agree that their security would improve were their villages placed legally under the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. Violence in this region is low compared to the rest of the country.

Sirwan mounts guard at a checkpoint at the entrance of Ali Saray. He wears black sunglasses and a Kevlar helmet. His thick moustache gives him away as a Kakai.

“If we finally get the chance to conduct a referendum whether we should be under the control of Erbil (administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan 310 kilometres north of Baghdad) we will vote favourably, and en masse.”

The soldier says a plebiscite had been scheduled in 2007 to decide the legal status of the “disputed areas” between Erbil and Baghdad. The referendum remains postponed until measures to counter-balance the Arabisation campaigns of Saddam Hussein are taken.

Writer Falakadin Kakaye, who stood as a bridge between the Kakais and the Iraqi Kurdish administration, died last month. He was twice elected minister of culture in the Kurdish executive before taking charge of relations between Erbil and Ankara.

Kakaye left behind a country facing levels of violence not seen since 2008. More than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in attacks in July.

Others are making an effort to preserve the rights of the Kakais, and their culture. Saad Salloum, chief editor of the Masarat magazine is struggling to document the diversity of Iraq before it disappears.

“Since 2003, we Iraqis have rediscovered our plurality,” says Salloum. “But far from accepting it as an enriching sign of our own identity, today we fear the neighbour more than any missile or weapon of mass destruction.”

Retired Kurdish veterans prepare to take up arms again. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
SULEYMANIA, Iraqi Kurdistan, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

“The Islamists’ announcement that god supported the killing of Kurds in Syria made us react,” recalls Farouk Aziz Khadir. This 60-year-old Iraqi Kurd is ready to take up arms to defend his kin in the neighbouring war-torn country. And there are many more like him.

Khadir, who spent nine years as a peshmerga (as armed Kurdish fighters are called), is also chair of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Veterans Association. A mandatory requisite for membership is “to have fought the tyrant until 1991.” That was the date when Iraq’s Kurds managed to push Saddam Hussein’s troops from their territory and set the grounds of their own autonomous region.

At their headquarters in Suleymania, 260 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, IPS is briefed on the most urgent project for these almost retired members of the peshmerga – that translates into the Kurdish language as “those who face death”."Erbil is under tremendous pressure from Iran, Turkey and the rest of the forces in the Middle East. We cannot let feelings prevail over logic." -- Dilshad Sharif, retired Kurdish veteran

“We are around 2,300 members, half of who are willing to fight alongside the Syrian Kurds against al-Qaeda affiliates trying to invade their territory,” says Khadir at his office, with nine other volunteers alongside.

Since the beginning of the uprising in Syria in March 2011, the war-torn country’s Kurds have pledged to fight for a “third way”, in clear opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s government but without completely aligning with the Arab insurgents either.

July has witnessed a dramatic increase in the flux of Islamic extremists into Kurdish areas in northern Syria. Many of these are allegedly backed by Turkey, which has repeatedly warned against yet another Kurdish autonomy project along its southern border. Little wonder here, as the one in Iraqi Kurdistan has already raised hackles in Ankara over the past 20 years.

Khadir talks about “an emergency scenario” but says the local veterans’ initiative is not exclusively military. “Each of us gave half of our salaries and pensions, and we gathered 15,000 dollars for our brothers in Syria. We also sent humanitarian aid such as food and tents.”

It has never been easy for the Kurds. After supporting the Allies against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) recognised a country for them.

But the international agreement was never ratified, and was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which divided Kurdish territory between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Around 40 million Kurds are now the largest stateless nation in the world.

The Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq is the closest thing to a state they have ever had. The obvious question is why Erbil – the administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan – does not send its own more numerous, better equipped and, of course younger soldiers to help the Kurds in Syria.

“Erbil is under tremendous pressure from Iran, Turkey and the rest of the forces in the Middle East,” says Dilshad Sharif, one of the elderly group. “We cannot let feelings prevail over logic.”

The ongoing peace negotiations between Ankara and the Kurds in Turkey are prime among several other sensitive issues. For almost three decades, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been fighting the Turkish government in a deadly struggle for language rights and constitutional recognition for the country’s Kurds.

The Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq are today the armed group’s stronghold, as well as a thorn in the relations between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan.

“I’m very proud of the PKK guerrilla fighters and I only regret not being younger to join them up in the mountains,” says Derwish Abdala. Recurrent television footage of the Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey brings “vivid memories” of his youth. “I see myself back in the 80’s,” Abdala says.

Hawre Ahmed reminds everybody of the “dire situation” Kurds are also facing in Iran. On a recent visit to the Qandil Mountains, senior PKK official Sabri Ok told this IPS reporter that the guerrilla movement had interceded between the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, another armed group, and Iran, and that a “de facto” ceasefire was under way between both sides. But things still seem far from settled for Iran’s Kurds.

“What could we possibly expect from a theocratic government that hangs our people in public places just for being Kurds?” says Ahmed.

The Amnesty International annual 2013 report speaks of mass arrests and “at least 63 public executions” of Kurds and other minority members in Iran.

“The blame cannot be put solely on foreign tyrannical regimes because we have also fought each other many times in the past,” says Khadir. The Kurdish Democratic Party (PDK), the still dominant Kurdish coalition party in northern Iraq, fought a bloody civil war after 1991 with other Kurdish parties. There were clashes also between the PDK and the PKK. Moreover, urgent agreements are yet to be taken among Syrian Kurds.

But despite the internal differences, these veterans see reason for optimism. On Jul. 22, representatives of the four parts of Kurdistan that are divided between nations gathered in Erbil in preliminary preparation for a Kurdish National Conference to be held in Erbil on Aug. 24.

“If someone had told me only two years ago that Kurdish parties from every side would ever sit around the same table I would have not believed it,” says the senior peshmerga leader. “Now I know we’re all on the right track.”

Soldiers in Bashiqa, Iraq, an area where Iraqi Christians are seeking autonomy. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
BASHIQA, Iraq, May 20 2013 (IPS)

Luis Shabi nostalgically recalls his nine years of novitiate in Rome and a “fantastic road trip through Europe” before returning to Iraq in 1969. “Those were the good times,” sighs the Chaldean Archbishop of Baghdad from a bunker in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

His office, in the basement of the church of Saint Mary of the Rosary, east of the city, is a humble temple. Yet it is protected today by high concrete walls, barbed wire and soldiers on guard next to an armoured vehicle at the entrance.s

“We have always been a peaceful and hardworking people, with a reputation for contributing to Iraqi culture with many writers, poets, philosophers,” the priest, wearing an immaculate black cassock and a pink bonnet, says of Iraqi Christians.

“But since the invasion in 2003, the extremists have reinforced the idea of us being ‘newcomers’, something like an ‘extension of the West’ in the Middle East,” laments Shabi, stressing that the fact that there were some Christian ministers during the years of Saddam Hussein “makes things even worse”.

“What has Europe done to help us? What about Rome? Neither civil authorities nor the religious ones in Europe have moved a single finger to assist us in one of the worst moments of our history.”

Targeting Christians

With Iraqi Mandaeans quite literally decimated – nine out of 10 have either died or fled since 2003 – the local Christian community has suffered significantly over the last decade. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that about half of that population has left the country since 2003.

The Assyrian Council of Europe, an independent non-governmental organisation, goes further, pointing to the Iraqi Constitution as one of the culprits of marginalisation faced by minorities in Iraq.

“Islam is the state religion and a basic foundation for the country’s law,” states Article 2.1 of Iraq’s 2005 Carta Magna.

“We are not Arabs but Semitic,” Shabi proclaims. “We’ve been speaking Aramaic in Mesopotamia since the times of Hammurabi. We are the grandsons of Abraham and of Nebuchadnezzar, but our future in Iraq does not go any further than tomorrow.”"Our future in Iraq does not go any further than tomorrow.”
-- Luis Shabi

From his underground bunker, it’s just a ten-minute walk to the modern and majestic white facade of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The church was renovated last year, but here no one has forgotten what happened here less than two years ago.

“They were five. They jumped over the concrete walls and entered the church yelling ‘God is great’,” remembers Aysur Said, the current pastor of the church. “They said they belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq – a Sunni group linked to al-Qaeda. It was Oct. 31, 2011. We were attending mass.”

Said’s predecessor, Father Waseem, was one of 50 killed in the most severe attack against this community since 2003. “Some died by gunfire and others by suffocation. A number of them were locked in a room that we use to dress up. There are no windows and the air ran out right away,” Said told IPS.

A place in Eden

Immediately after the brutal attack, the Christians of Iraq demanded their own autonomous region in the plains of Nineveh region, in the northwest of the country, bordering the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq.

In those plains, where the Bible places the Garden of Eden, is a compact Christian population. Today the area is disputed by Kurds and Arabs. Its administrative capital is the former Baathist stronghold of Mosul, a place shaken by sectarian clashes since mass protests began taking place last December.

Bashiqa, 30 kilometres from Mosul, is one of the places that many Christians claim as part of their would-be autonomous region. From the Orthodox church of Mart Shmouni, 23-year-old Father Daniel underscores “the importance of unity among Iraqis”, though he admits that unity is not easy.

“This is chaos. The new authorities in Baghdad are unable to protect us, so our people continue to flee in the thousands,” Father Daniel told IPS. “However, in recent months we have also welcomed many Christian families arriving from Syria and knocking the doors of our monasteries and churches. Many of them [come] with virtually nothing.”

Despite its proximity to volatile Mosul, Bashiqa enjoys relative stability, something that Father Daniel attributes to the deployment of Kurdish soldiers in the area. “For many, Bashiqa is just a stop along their way to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, where security is complete,” explains the pastor.

Kirkuk, 230 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, also languishes in a legal limbo between Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government.

Imad Yokhana Yago, a member of parliament in Baghdad for the Assyrian Democratic Movement, denounces “genocide at the hands of Islamists” and the “continuous mass flight” of his people since 2003. At the same time, he advocates for a project tailored to his dwindling community.

“We fear there will be a new war in the country due to the tensions between Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs,” Yago tells IPS from Kirkuk, calling for Christian autonomy in Nineveh region that would “protect our community and also work as a ‘buffer zone’ between the warring sides”.

The project, however, is a controversial one, as many fear that such region could turn into a ghetto into which Christians from all the country would be displaced.

“The repression we are suffering does not come exclusively from the Iraqi Arabs,” asid Yousif Eisho, executive of the Assyrian Christian Movement. “Iran, Saudi Arabia… there are too many foreign agents involved in the ethnic cleansing of our people.”

“The said ghetto will eventually turn real if the constant interference from the outside remains,” Eisho warned.

Zeki Gorbuz, a Turkish asylum seeker in Greece, who was arrested on Feb. 12, remains detained today due to an international warrant that was transmitted by Turkish authorities to Greece just one day before his asylum interview. Turkish media were quick to report the arrest, describing Gorbuz as a radical leftist and regional leader of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party (MLCP), which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government.

On the same day that Gorbuz was detained, Bulent Aytunc Comert, who arrived in Greece as an asylum seeker in 2002, was also arrested. His request for asylum was approved in 2003 but was never cleared by the ministry of police.

Branded by Turkish authorities as a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), Comert is a fugitive. He was imprisoned in the notorious solitary confinement units known as the “White Cells” on what he says was a fabricated murder charge.

“Members of several civil society organisations and student groups [in Turkey] have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism."
Having come here to escape persecution, Gorbuz and Comert, like many other Turkish political dissidents and Turkish Kurds, are now stuck in no-man’s land, suspended between the highly bureaucratic Greek immigration and asylum system, and an extremely hostile government in Turkey.

Indications of a secret deal to return asylum seekers in Greece to Turkey are surfacing, while human rights activists warn of the grave impacts of Greece’s plan to extradite persons in need of international protection against criminal charges that might be fabricated by Turkish authorities.

According to Turkish media reports, a Feb. 4 meeting between Turkish Chief of Police Mehmet Kiliclar and Greek Police Chief Nikolaos Papagiannopoulos ended with the Greek official’s promise to dismantle Kurdish as well as radical leftist “Turkish terrorist cells” here.

A month later, on Mar. 4, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited Turkey for a high profile meeting with his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, where the two heads of state signed 25 cooperation deals covering areas such as health, tourism and fighting illegal migration.

That same day, the Ankara Strategic Institution pointed out that private Turkish investment in Greece has been used as a pressure tool in order to promote the deal on extradition. More reports followed referring to preparations for extraditions but the Greek government is yet to responded to any of them.

Besides Gorbuz and Comert, three more asylum seekers have been arrested since February, including Meric Serkan on Feb. 14, Fadik Adauman on Feb. 26 and Huseyin Cakil on Apr. 6. All are wanted by Turkish authorities for “terrorist activity” and, according to the Greek Council for Refugees, all five have been victims of torture during their detention in Turkey.

The activist group Movement for Freedom and Democratic Rights (KEDDE), which has been a whistleblower on the deal between Turkish and Greek authorities, says there is no guarantee of Turkish dissidents’ safety if they are forced to return.

“People arrested under the Turkish anti-terror law are subject to a long detention with an indefinite time limit and with no access to their case file until the beginning of the trial (which could be situated two years later),” according to a statement on the group’s website.

“It might also mean they become subject to the jurisdiction and judgment of special courts, for the operation of which Turkey has been several times condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, since these courts make use…as means of ‘proof’ confessions extorted through torture.”

Cakil’s case was tried in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and, given that his asylum claim has been informally accepted and is pending ministry clearance, the move to extradite him was denied.

Gorbuz and Comert who were apprehended in Patras, about 215 kilometres west of Athens, were also spared extradition but they will now have to face a court of second instance.

Given that most cases here take months or even years just to reach court, let alone a decision, this “rapid response by Greek authorities…is indicative of political interests (both Greek and Turkish) behind the cases,” lawyer Dimitris Sarafianos, member of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights (ELDH), told IPS.

He believes it “strange” that the prosecutor of the court of second instance appealed the decision in “absolute contradiction with the fact that the prosecutor of the hearing had pointed out that the charges were heavily unfounded, requesting for the continuation of the detention of one refugee (Gorbuz).”

“Given the persistent rumours referring to a secret agreement between the two Prime Ministers, Samaras and Erdogan, concerning matters of extradition of asylum seekers to Turkey, it is clear that the Greek government is prompt to violate the Geneva Convention,” the lawyer said.

According to Sarafianos, who participated in an ELDH fact-finding mission to Turkey, over 10,000 citizens of Kurdish origin are currently faced with charges, as are scores of Turkish unionist in the private and public sectors, professors, students and lawyers defending human rights.

The extradition deal currently being worked out the with Greek authorities appears to be part and parcel of this ongoing wave of detentions and arrests of political dissidents as well as suspected members of the DHKP-C – branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union — and members of Turkey’s Contemporary Lawyers Association (CHD).

Earlier this year, Erdogan rushed to connect the DHKP-C with the Feb. 1 bombing of the U.S embassy in Ankara.

Dr. Kerem Oktem, expert on contemporary Turkish politics and research fellow at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, told IPS that although the detentions “caused a great outcry…many of the arrested people are intimately related to the DHKP-C, which took responsibility for the bombing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters and the Justice Ministry in Ankara on Mar. 11.”

Although Oktem acknowledges that “members of several civil society organisations and student groups have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism”, he believes it would be incorrect to characterise the crackdown as being directed solely against dissenting civil voices.

Often it is aimed at apprehending “groups and individuals that maintain relations with real terrorist groups”, he said.

(END)

Kurdish militias in Syria have controlled the oil rich area of Rumelan since early March. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
DERIK, Syria, Apr 11 2013 (IPS)

At seven o’clock in the morning on Mar. 1, Kurdish militias took over the only operational oil refinery in Syria, located about 800 kilometres northwest of Damascus.

“They told us to go home, and to wait for two days until everything was settled,” recalled Mahmud Hassan, one of 3,000 workers at the Rumelan refinery.

According to Abu Muhamad, an engineer at the production department, the plant consists of over 1,350 “Canadian-type extractors spread over an area of ​​about 3,000 square kilometres.

“Before the revolution we would easily produce 165,000 oil barrels a day but today we are pumping around 50,000,” he told IPS, adding that the Kurdish militias are “protecting the wells” and are tasked with distributing salaries to the workers.

The oil plant has become a symbol of Syria’s fractured oil industry, which has gradually ground to a halt since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime broke out in 2011.

Locals sources say it may also have brought the different armed groups closer together in order to negotiate how the last remaining local oil supply will be managed.

Before the revolt, the country’s many oil fields yielded 300,000 barrels a day. In 2010, oil exports touched the three-billion-dollar mark.

Now, the government is importing the very resource that was once the axis of its entire economy in order to meet local demand.

Though oil from Rumelan continues to flow to Homs and Banyas, located 160 and 280 kilometres north of Damascus respectively, “international sanctions (against Assad’s regime), and constant sabotage by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or people who want to sell the oil by themselves, have cut the supply drastically since the revolution”, said Hassan, who worked for over two decades at the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company that owns the Rumelan refinery.

He fears that if various armed groups continue to spar over control of the refinery, it could be catastrophic for the country.

While Assad’s government concentrates its efforts on crushing the rebellion raging through Syria, most of the northeastern region of the country has been under de facto Kurdish rule since July 2012.

Many have suggested that the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant political party representing Syrian Kurds, negotiated a truce with Assad’s government in exchange for greater control over the country’s Kurdish-majority regions.

PYD Chairman Salah Muslim told IPS that no such agreement had taken place.

But there is no doubt that the party and its militias enjoy widespread influence and control, with or without the government’s blessing.

Commander Feirusha, head of one of the Popular Protection Committees (known by the Kurdish acronym YPG), told IPS, “We have more than 30,000 troops deployed throughout all the Kurdish regions in Syria. We never (use) violence unless it is absolutely necessary,” he added proudly, driving his pickup truck across the flat landscape dotted with bouncing oil pumpers and fire columns.

“We respect the FSA units but we hate the Salafists,” continued 30-year-old Feirusha, who has 300 militiamen under his command.

He assured IPS that the Rumelan refinery takeover was conducted in a “peaceful way, through dialogue and without any shooting”, a testimony supported by footage taken on the spot by Abbas Khabat, a local journalist at Hawar News Agency.

But this claim has not stopped the government from lashing out at the local workers, whose wages have been withheld since March.

Most of the refinery’s 3,000 workers live with their families in a residential compound not far from the refinery, in a cluster of concrete blocks surrounded by scrub, the flat roofs lined with water-collection tanks.

Every day that they don’t receive their wages, concern grows among the staff.

“We keep working in the same way, our routines have not changed at all,” explains electrician Hafez al Nuseibi. This veteran refinery operator fears that Damascus may have interrupted salaries in retaliation for the recent takeover at the plant.

But in this tense atmosphere, fear quickly gives way to anger. “If we don’t get paid in the forthcoming days we’ll go on strike and paralyse the whole country,” Nuseibi warned.

Other workers are convinced that the different political groups are in cahoots with one another, and the delay in salaries is a result of secret negotiations that might not yet have reached a conclusion.

“A week after the YPG took over the plant, two secret meetings were held between the Kurds, the FSA and government representatives,” said Firat Dicle (not his real name), who has worked at the Rumelan refinery for over 25 years.

“The guests were hosted at the refinery’s administration building and their main point of discussion was how to split the profits from Rumelan into three parts,” he told IPS.

“Eventually they agreed that both the FSA and the YPG-PYD would get 30 percent, whereas 40 percent of the revenue would go to Damascus. While the three parties are fighting on the ground it’s clear they all badly need to keep fuel flowing,” says the veteran oil worker.

The situation is compounded by the fact that “everybody is afraid of both the regime and the FSA.”

Clashes between the FSA and the YPG reached their peak during the three-month battle of Serekaniye, 500 kilometres northeast of Damascus, until both sides declared a ceasefire in February.

Abu Muhamad, who combines his technical position with the political post of PYD head delegate in Rumelan, stressed, “Rumelan belongs not only to the Kurds but also to the Arabs, the Christians and the Syrian people as a whole.”

The senior representative disputes allegations that the Kurdish party entered into deals with the FSA or the government to share oil revenues, insisting, “Neither the PYD nor the YPG get any economic benefit whatsoever.

“Our main goal is that the plant continues to operate for the common good – a disruption of the supply will only be fatal for us. We would be paralysed while Damascus would still receive fuel from Iran, Russia and China.”

A PKK soldier stands in front of a crowd gathered in the Qandil mountains to hear the long-awaited message of peace from Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QANDIL MOUNTAINS, Iraq, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

It was only seven in the morning when Mohamed Abdi spread out a rug a few metres away from an artillery crater, up in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq. This Iraqi Kurd from Suleimaniyah, 260 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, was ready to celebrate the Newroz – the Kurdish and Persian New Year – along with his family.

They had travelled here for what promised to be the most special Newroz festival in years — not only for its setting in these imposing snow-capped mountains but for bringing a long-awaited message from Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

“Last year there were much less people here, probably because of a fear of bombs. Maybe it’s crowded because we are talking about peace this time,” this former ‘peshmerga’, an Iraqi Kurdish soldier, told IPS.

The Abdis were far from the only family who had risen so early. In fact, over a hundred PKK guerrillas were struggling to manage the unusually busy traffic as thousands of Kurds in hundreds of vans and minibuses crawled along the winding road up to this PKK stronghold.

For almost three decades, the PKK has been fighting the Turkish government in Ankara, in a deadly struggle for language rights and constitutional recognition for the country’s 15 million Kurds that has claimed over 40,000 lives and destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border.

Between 30 and 40 million Kurds are today divided by the borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. But on Thursday, those borders seemed to melt away as Kurds from various regions converged here, prepared to wait several hours to hear news of a ceasefire.

Starred PKK flags mingled with the yellow and green flags of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the dominant coalitions in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.

The stage set up for musical performances, speeches, and even small theatre sketches attracted most of the attention. Blown-up images of the most prominent deceased PKK fighters – including the three Kurdish female activists murdered in Paris in January — stood out starkly against the snowy peaks, rising above a sea of heads and thousands of waving flags.

People lined up to have their pictures taken next to huge portraits of the Kurdish leader, imprisoned since 1999; food and tea was served and books were sold from makeshift stalls. Many also took the chance to greet long-lost friends and relatives.

Having driven up here from Van, 920 kilometres east of Ankara, Gulistan hugged her younger brother for the first time since he joined the PKK four years ago.

“We have seven family members in the PKK and we are all very proud of them,” claimed their father Muhamed.

Three Kurds queued next to them to get a picture with the young fighter, a request that was made of each and every guerrilla present that day.

“We have driven from Erbil (the administrative capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, 320 kilometres away from Baghdad) to celebrate Newroz with our brothers from the north,” Nashuan, a young Iraqi Kurd, told IPS.

Ayub Salahadin, a taxi driver from Suleimaniya, echoed his sentiments.

“The PKK today reminds us Iraqi Kurds of what we were just twenty years ago. We all feel some kind of nostalgia when we see these young guys,” he told IPS, referring to the decades-long guerrilla war that Iraqi Kurds fought against Saddam Hussein’s regime. That conflict ended only after the Kurds started building up their own autonomous region in 1991, after the First Gulf War.

Uncertain future

Ocalan’s message was officially read out by leaders of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s biggest Kurdish city, located about 670 kilometres southeast of Ankara. At two o’clock the message reached the roughly 8,000 people gathered in Qandil.

According to the ceasefire declaration, “The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders…It’s not the end. It’s the start of a new era.”

PKK Chief Leader Murat Karayilan confirmed the statement in a broadcasted message late Thursday afternoon.

Although the mood in the mountains was joyful, many of the older generation struck a wary tone when discussing the future.

“It’s not just us who need to make a move towards peace — Turkey should do her part too,” explained Saharestan, a veteran fighter from Afrin, a Kurdish town in the north of Syria.

Years of struggle in the mountains have already turned this middle-aged woman’s hair completely white; a seasoned fighter, she is hesitant to express optimism, claiming that Turkey has fooled the Kurds  “too often” in the past.

If negotiations remain on track, Saharestan and her comrades will cease armed activities in Turkey and withdraw definitively to these mountains.

In a clear move toward dialogue, the PKK handed over eight prisoners – six soldiers, a policeman and a civil servant – to Ankara on Mar. 13.

But unsettled issues and simmering tensions suggest the road to peace will not be smooth.

“I don’t feel too optimistic,” confessed Mahmud, an Iranian Kurdish fighter. “It’s mandatory that Apo (a popular nickname for Ocalan) is released from prison, in order to finally reach a peace agreement between the two parties,” he stressed.

In fact, prudence seemed to be the most popular sentiment among the guerrillas.

“We cannot comment on anything until we have examined in depth Ocalan’s message,” PKK Press Liaison Roj Welat told IPS from a tent adjacent to the stage.

“Nonetheless, it is obvious to everybody that Turkish policy in the Middle East has failed. Besides, the whole region has been shaken by a wave of revolts and unrest for the last two years — these two factors shall definitely play a key role in Ankara’s will for peace.”

(END)

Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed Kurdish rebel leader, has issued a long-awaited ceasefire declaration that would be a major step towards ending a 30-year conflict that has cost around 40,000 lives in Turkey.

The ceasefire announced on Thursday, which coincides with the Kurdish New Year, or Newroz, also calls for the withdrawal of his PKK organisation, likely to bases in northern Iraq.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the ceasefire call was a “positive development”.

“There are groups that are fed by terror in our country. This process will ruin their game,” he said, speaking during a visit to the Netherlands.

In Ocalan’s letter, read out by members of parliament Pervin Buldan, in Kurdish, and Sirri Sureyya Onder, in Turkish, the PKK leader said: “Let guns be silenced and politics dominate.

“The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders … It’s not the end. It’s the start of a new era.”

The statement was read out to a sea of red-yellow-green Kurdish flags, in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir, where hundreds of thousands gathered for celebrations.

Erdogan expressed his disappointment because there were no Turkish flags at the Newroz celebrations in Diyarbakir.

“This is a provocative approach by the circles who wants to influence the process in a negative way,” he said.

Ocalan’s ceasefire is likely to be in return for wider constitutional recognition and language rights for Turkey’s up to 15 million Kurds.

The peace plan is the result of written consultations between Ocalan, pro-Kurdish legislators and PKK bodies in Europe and northern Iraq, under the close monitoring of Turkish agents.

Kurdish legislators say Ocalan might ask for commissions to be established to properly monitor the ceasefire, and call for safe passage for fighters wishing to leave Turkey.

‘Political career’

Erdogan and Ocalan both appear to have staked their political futures on the renewed push to end the conflict.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Diyarbakir, said Erdogan had made no secret that he was eyeing the presidency.

“He will need to amend the constitution and would like to increase the powers of the president. He cannot do that without the support of the Kurdish party, the BDP.”

Erdogan said he was putting his faith in the peace process “even if it costs me my political career,” in the face of accusations that Ankara was making concessions to Ocalan.

Ocalan, known as “Apo,” has said he wants peace for the greater good of his people.

“Consider Apo dead if this process fails. I am simply out,” the burly 64-year-old was quoted as saying in a rare prison meeting with Kurdish legislators last month.

Hard road ahead

If a ceasefire holds, the path to disarmament, and the reintegration of PKK fighters, will still be long and vulnerable to sabotage.

The fate of Ocalan also remains uncertain, but any move to release him would be strongly opposed by critics who see any settlement as threatening Turkish unity.

The prospect of talks with the PKK has outraged many Turks who revile Ocalan and hold him personally responsible for the bloodshed.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.