As Ireland prepares for its referendum today, May 25, on repealing the constitutional amendment prohibiting free, safe, legal abortion, women and health workers in Rojava, the largely Kurdish area in Syria's north, have expressed their solidarity with Irish women’s right to choose.
With the exception of the Vatican state and Malta, Ireland has the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. It exceeds Saudi Arabia and Qatar in its restrictions on women’s rights to basic reproductive health.
In recent days, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have once again been ratcheting up their clash of the colonisers, writes Marcel Cartier.
Protracted restrictions on the human rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association are incompatible with the conduct of a credible electoral process in Turkey, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said on May 9.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in a May 8 speech: “If one day our nation says tamam (enough), only then will we step aside.” In response, millions of people posted tweets featuring the word “tamam”.
There were more than 1.8 million posts including the word “tamam”, while different versions/spellings of the word were also popular. The hashtag #devam (“continue”) started by pro-Erdoğan groups immediately after lagged behind at 300,000 posts.
[Abridged from ANF News.]
“Freedom” can be a very difficult word to define, but it is easy to understand when you lose it.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decision to call an early general election on June 24 — a year and a half before it was due — is a sign of weakness and desperation, according to opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Lezgin Botan.
Turkey has condemned Israel’s slaughter of unarmed Palestinians, but the Turkish regime commits the same atrocities against Kurdish people.
The Democratic Autonomous Administration of Afrin Canton in Syria’s north, which is resisting Turkey’s occupation, has warned all Syrians that Turkey’s murderous attack aims at ethnic cleansing.
Turkey’s murderous invasion of the Afrin canton in Syria’s north, backed explicitly or implicitly by Russia and the US, succeeded in taking the canton’s capital on March 18. But Kamran Martin says this is far from the end for the Kurdish-led resistance in defence of the democratic revolution in the region.
The Kurdish Red Crescent reported on February 27 that at least 348 civilians had died in the conflict begun by Turkey’s January 20 invasion of northern Syria’s small enclave of Afrin.
I am almost four years old. I am on horseback with my mother as our family is being smuggled from northern Iraq across the border on a clear spring dawn. It is 1988 and the Iran-Iraq War is at its final, gruelling, violent end.
A cool breeze blows against us.
I stare up at the sky tracking the sound of the planes and anticipating the familiar silence before the bang of exploding bombs shatter the earth. The planes circle overhead, but this plane is different from the other planes we’ve seen so often.
The Afrin canton in Northern Syria is under sustained assault from invading Turkish forces and allied Islamist gangs.
The Turkish invasion, accompanied by reports of massacres and use of chemical weapons, aims to destroy the progressive, democratic Kurdish-led revolution in Syria’s north, which places women’s liberation at its centre.