Turkey

Turkish dictator President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is using the earthquake disaster as a weapon in his ongoing war on the Kurdish people according to Zerebar Karimi.

The Iranian and Turkish governments have deported more than 240,000 Afghan refugees this year, in violation of international law, reports Ben Radford.

NATO summit Madrid

NATO has given the Turkish state the green light for genocide against the Kurds, after the deal struck between Turkey, Sweden and Finland, reports Peter Boyle.

Protesting the war

Seven political parties met in Ankara to discuss the creation of a democratic front and released a joint statement on the war in Ukraine, reports Medya News.

Steve Sweeney writes that Kurdish officials have accused Western powers of complicity in Turkish airstrikes on the United Nations-administered Makhmour Refugee Camp in northern Iraq.

A “solidarity selfie” campaign has drawn the backing of mayors, councillors, MPs, artists, religious leaders, trade unionists and activists in support of Kurdish mayors and parliamentarians imprisoned by the Turkish government, writes Ismet Tastan.

A protest against Turkey's invasion of Rojava, in Melbourne on October 12.

If Prime Minister Scott Morrison is as concerned about refugees as he claims to be, then Australia should condemn Turkey's invasion of Syria and secure emergency aid for those being forced to flee the region.

A protest against Turkey's invasion of Rojava, in Sydney on October 12.

Several trade unions, the Senate and the local Australian-Kurdish community have called on the federal Coalition government to condemn Turkey’s invasion of north-eastern Syria, a region commonly known as Rojava.

The Turkish state’s hostility towards the Kurdish people continues, having now escalated its threats against Rojava.

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.

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.

Afrin, a city within the canton of the same name in northern Syria , is under siege by the Turkish military, supported by right wing jihadist forces, including al-Quaeda, al-Nusra and the remnants of ISIS. Fifty-two days after the invasion began, more than 290 civilians had been killed.

Northern Syria (also known by its Kurdish name of “Rojava”) has been the scene of a social revolution with women’s liberation at its centre in recent years. However, it has come under constant attack.

On January 20, Turkey launched an invasion of Afrin, one of the three cantons that make up the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (also known as Rojava), the site of a profound, Kurdish-led social revolution based on multi-ethnic participatory democracy and women’s liberation.

The invasion has killed dozens of civilians in an area that has welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria’s conflict. Turkey’s actions would be impossible without at least passive acceptance from several great powers active in Syria. Cihad Hammy looks at the motivations for various major players.

The dark clouds of 21st-century fascism are once again hanging over the heads of the people of northern Syria. As if the inhabitants of the region often referred to as Rojava haven’t suffered enough over the course of the past 7 years of war, the Turkish state has come to the conclusion that the time is ripe to pick up the fallen, bloodied sword from the corpse that is Islamic State.

Together with Salafist mercenaries carrying flags of the Syrian ‘rebels’ – one of the many components of what at one historical juncture seemingly all so long ago was a cohesive ‘Free Syrian Army’ – Erdogan’s regime vows a ‘swift operation’ to destroy ‘terrorism’ in Afrin.

Three years after Kurdish-led forces liberated the northern Syrian city of Kobane from ISIS — after a months-long siege that captured the world’s imagination — the democratic, multi-ethnic and feminist revolution in Syria’s north is facing a new assault.

This time, it is coming directly from the virulently anti-Kurdish Turkish state, which had supported ISIS’s siege of Kobane.

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