When I was seven years old, my family was forced to flee escalating violence. We left Bakur – a Kurdish region in what is currently southeastern Turkey – for a city further west, where we worked in Turkish fields, living in a tent until we could save up to rent a house on the city margins, in a neighbourhood with no electricity or road access. Those are some of my earliest memories of everyday violence against people like me.

For centuries, my ancestors had lived in relative harmony with other communities. But, with the emergence of modern nation-states in the region, Kurdistan – the traditional homeland of the Kurds – was fractured into southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. A violent assimilation was imposed upon us. For more than a century, Kurdish people have been denied recognition as a nation, their language banned, erased from maps, stripped of citizenship rights, and dispossessed of their lands. For my generation, therefore, freedom was never an abstract political matter; armed struggle was often seen as a necessity to achieve it. Even so, national liberation movements always sought dialogue with the states they fought against. I grew up inside that insistence, carrying the hope of a dignified peace.

In 2013, after almost three decades of war, peace talks were held between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which first sought an independent Kurdish state and, later, autonomy and increased political and cultural rights for Kurds within Turkey. In 2015, these collapsed. War returned to Kurdistan and, with it, the persecution of everyone who had staked something on that possibility of peace. This included me. I was a doctoral student at the time, researching economic autonomy in Kurdistan, and it became clear that this work would no longer be tenable in the new political climate. I moved to Latin America, to complete my doctoral studies and study revolutionary movements in that part of the world, grappling all the while with a question that had become inseparable from my own existence: how could peace be built in Kurdistan?

The academic literature on peace told me I might find an answer in Guatemala. Between 1960 and 1996, civil war had ravaged the country, killing more than 200,000 people and displacing more than a million – more than a 10th of the total population. The conflict – which began as an uprising against extreme inequality, particularly in land ownership, and systemic discrimination against the Maya people – had turned the state into a counterinsurgency apparatus, powered by paramilitary death squads and a doctrine of the ‘internal enemy’ that erased the line between combatant and civilian. Against this backdrop, the Acuerdo de Paz Firme y Duradera (Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace) was both celebrated and touted as innovative when it was signed in 1996. The agreement broke ground by confronting the past directly: the Commission for Historical Clarification investigated the atrocities committed during the civil war, most of them attributable to the state, and, unusually, partly as a result of its findings, heads of state were later tried for war crimes.

But it was soon apparent that the peace accord had failed to address the problems that led to the conflict in the first place. The guerilla fighters who returned to their villages – or who had to reinvent themselves in cities where no one was waiting for them – found intact the system they had been unable to transform through armed struggle: poverty. Today, Guatemala remains one of the most unequal countries in Latin America vis-à-vis class, ethnicity and gender. The deepest wound of the war – land tenure – was never resolved: no equitable land redistribution took place after the 1996 accords. In fact, as the World Bank researchers Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine have noted: ‘Guatemala has become a substantially more violent country since the end of the internal armed conflict.’

One ex-combatant had joined the insurgency as a 13-year-old and stayed in the mountains until the peace accord was signed. I met him in 2017, more than 20 years after the formal end to the war, at the community radio project he had built near Xela, in the western highlands of Guatemala. ‘Despite the deaths and the hardship of the war, I never cried,’ he told me. ‘But the day the war ended, I cried – because I didn’t know how to live in peace: I had no home, no job, no trade. And I asked myself: what now?’

Peace, as currently practised, doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place

I had come to Guatemala searching for an answer to my own political and existential preoccupations but it was the ex-combatant’s question – What now? – that stayed with me, an accusation directed at the very concept of peace he had been promised.

Guatemala is not an anomaly in this regard. Since the end of the Cold War, more than 30 comprehensive peace agreements have been signed around the world but few, if any, have succeeded in building a durable peace. Accords signed under the dominant peacebuilding paradigm focus almost exclusively on stopping direct violence through ceasefires, weapons handovers, disarmament, individual reintegration, all on the assumption that democratic institutions and free markets will naturally produce lasting peace. But peace, as currently practised, doesn’t break the cycle of injustice that leads to war in the first place.

The sociologist Johan Galtung, often described as the founder of peace and conflict studies, distinguished between ‘negative peace’ – the absence of direct violence – and ‘positive peace’, which requires dismantling the structures of injustice that fuel conflict. The typical approach to peace in post-conflict contexts is encapsulated in the United Nations’ classic disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration model, first implemented by its peacekeeping operations in El Salvador in 1989 and used in more than 30 countries since. Under this strategy, former combatants are required to surrender their weapons and disband their command structures, and are entitled to short-term stipends and training that will facilitate their reintegration into civilian economic life. This approach was also implemented in Guatemala.

But what neither Galtung nor other sophisticated theorists of a liberal framework for peace tend to question is whether capitalist relations of production can lead to peace when this is itself a structural source of violence. They propose reforms, redistribution, greater inclusion – but all within the same system that armed struggles in places like Guatemala sought to transform. As a sociologist interested in revolutionary social movements, what I have observed in my fieldwork in Guatemala, Colombia and northern Syria has led me to a more radical conclusion: real peace requires building economies that operate on an entirely different logic from that of capital – not just in postwar communities but more widely, because we all need more peace in our daily lives.

Cooperatives are one mechanism through which a different economic logic, one more conducive to a durable peace, can take root.In the language of the International Cooperative Alliance – an association established in 1895 when the concept, while as old as time itself, seemed to be gaining traction in Europe – cooperatives are collective entities established by people who come together to address common economic and social needs. They are founded on principles of democracy and autonomy, and built on voluntary participation and solidarity. From the Rochdale weavers of northern England in 1844 – often regarded as the forebears of modern cooperatives – to present-day credit unions, the cooperative movement has produced both genuinely emancipatory experiments and organisations that simply reproduce market logic under a different name. Cooperativism is also central to democratic confederalism, a political theory put forth by Abdullah Öcalan, one of the PKK’s founding members. It was through reading Öcalan that I became interested in the emancipatory potential of cooperatives.

A form of self-determination oriented towards the autonomy of all peoples, particularly women, democratic confederalism proposes a structure of governance organised from the bottom up. In Öcalan’s paradigm, cooperatives are the means through which an economy in service of these principles – communal, ecological, feminist – might be built. The cooperatives that interest me, therefore, have three defining characteristics: they are part of broader social movements and territorial struggles; they prioritise meeting collective needs over the accumulation of capital; and they challenge not just economic exploitation but also the patriarchy, racism, colonialism and statism entwined with capitalism. Such cooperatives are the building blocks of what I call an ‘anticapitalist peace’ – a peace not satisfied with the silencing of arms, nor with positive peace that doesn’t challenge capitalist logic, but one that transforms the economic relations at the root of violence. I have encountered two cases that demonstrate this concretely, in two different parts of the world.

In 2014, as Syria was disintegrating under the weight of a brutal civil war, something unusual happened in the country’s north and east. The Kurdish people – after a century of systemic oppression – declared de facto democratic autonomy in the territories they began to control. Instead of declaring a new nation-state, however, they set up a system of assemblies, communes, cantons and cooperatives that sought to reorganise social life from below, under principles of democratic confederalism. This project was formalised as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, better known as Rojava.

Everyone debated and made decisions about their neighbourhood, their communities, their families

By the time I arrived in early 2018, the project’s economic architecture – in service of a social economy that prioritised social, ecological and collective goals over profit maximisation – was already in place. I’d come to Rojava for doctoral research but also because it was the first time Kurds were putting democratic confederalism into practice and building cooperatives as part of a revolutionary movement. I wanted to witness that process myself, and to tell the world that an anticapitalist economy was possible. By then, half a million hectares of land had been communalised with collective-use rights, and cooperatives had sprung up in every town. Women’s economic committees are central to Öcalan’s argument that a communal economy should be guided by knowledge preserved by women over the course of capitalism’s development and spread, precisely because women think (or have typically had to think) about collective need and care. They were introducing the model to their communities with the slogan ‘one cooperative for every commune’.

Upon my arrival, what I found most immediately striking was not the scale of the project but the transformation of everyday time. In Rojava, people typically work until 2.30 pm, return home to eat and rest, then go out again at 5 pm – not to work more hours, but to take part in an assembly: of the cooperative, the commune, the women’s congress or the municipality, where everyone debated and made decisions about their neighbourhood, their communities, their families. Almost no one chose to stay at home. This organisation of time was a radical departure from the exhaustion that capitalism imposes seemingly everywhere else, where punishing schedules and precarity systematically prevent people from having any say over their own lives, leaving the state or the market as the only actor capable of making decisions about the collective.

Karl Marx called it alienated labour: work that doesn’t express human capacities but instead exhausts them, that turns both body and time into commodities. This form of violence produces no visible corpses, no headlines, but something essential is destroyed all the same: the possibility of deciding over one’s own life. What do I produce? For whom?How do I want to live? Under capitalism, such questions are answered not by people but by the market. In Rojava, people sought to answer these questions collectively – What do we produce? For whom do we produce? How do we produce? – in assemblies and other public fora, and established cooperatives accordingly.

In the commune assemblies that I attended, people deliberated these questions in relation to electricity, grain and bread. Answering ‘How many loaves will we produce?’ required knowing how many families ate bread and how much bread they typically consumed. But ‘How will we produce it?’ demanded something else entirely: the founding of a bread cooperative that reversed a belief – ‘We are a society that no longer knows how to make bread’ – born of what many considered the Syrian state’s colonial-era ‘prohibition’ on baking one’s own bread. Strictly speaking, no formal prohibition existed; rather, state subsidy programmes and a ration-card system for wheat and flour made people dependent on cheap, state-distributed bread, which undermined the practice of baking at home. To want to return to older methods was to have to relearn them, to recover knowledge that had often been taken away deliberately.

Then there was the question of milk, from a cooperative built to raise animals: should it go to the children first, to the neighbours, or should it become the basis of a yogurt factory? Answers to each had to be found. In other words, as communes debated how to produce to meet their needs, they were never simply weighing inputs against outputs; they were reaching for an economy grounded in anticolonial practice and in an ethical distribution of the surplus. Everyone who lived in the commune took part in these debates – the differences of political opinion, religious belief and ethnic identity that had been named as causes of Syria’s civil war were not, here, a source of conflict or division. They became, instead, the commune’s social wealth, raw material from which richer, more varied answers and solutions could be found.

Equally central to the project was its feminist dimension. Rojava’s social economy is based on a principle that mainstream economics – and most Left movements – have historically ignored: reproductive and care work, performed predominantly by women, is not a secondary complement to the economy, but its foundation. When that work remains invisible and confined to the domestic sphere, women cannot partake in political life and are unable to participate in the assemblies that build autonomy. Rojava’s social economy promoted the socialisation of such work through cooperatives where women could participate without commodifying their labour. Across Kurdistan, for instance, women have always prepared preserves for the turn of the seasons: cheeses, pickled vegetables, dried produce, ground spices. Done alone, for one’s own family, this work was never counted as economic activity, even though it catered to a large share of collective need. These preserves aren’t just food, either: they carry memory, culture, the rhythm of the land’s cycles. The cooperatives built around them safeguard that inherited knowledge and turn it into a shared capacity, allowing women to produce for their families and communities, and exchange or sell the surplus to meet other needs.

I found this to be deeply intuitive: if the organisation of the economy is itself the organisation of life, then transforming the economy ceases to be a distant or abstract struggle, instead becoming a concrete way of inhabiting the world daily. This socialisation is not incidental or complementary to peace; it is a structural condition of peace.

Political autonomy is destroyed by military force; cultural identity is granted as a gesture of tolerance

What I witnessed in Rojava was something I had rarely seen in post-conflict contexts: peace built not as the absence of war – because war continues in Rojava – but as a way of daily life. Historically, millions of people were living a process of true self-governance, with their identities reconstituted and their voices active in collective decision-making. To build anticapitalist peace, Rojava shows, negative peace is not indispensable. The form of social organisation is what matters.

Today, this social organisation is at an inflexion point. At the beginning of 2026, Syrian government forces, jihadist groups and Turkish-backed militias launched a large-scale offensive on Kurdish-administered territories, forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to withdraw from the Arab territories they had administered for years, falling back to the original Kurdish heartland of Rojava. A ceasefire agreement signed at the end of January required the SDF to formally cede key territories, renounce strategic oil fields, and integrate individually into the Syrian army, without recognition as an autonomous force. For many within the movement, this amounted to capitulation: the surrender of 14 years of revolutionary construction under threat of a war of extermination.

What the Damascus government offered in return was telling: recognition of Kurds as a cultural minority – the right to speak their language, to preserve certain identity expressions – but no autonomous Kurdish-language education system, no constitutional recognition of self-determination, no structure of self-governance whatsoever. Political autonomy is destroyed by military force; cultural identity is granted as a gesture of tolerance. This is the characteristic hypocrisy of state multiculturalism: erasing real power while preserving folklore.

This development does not invalidate what Rojava built – on the contrary, it makes it more urgent to understand. It shows that anticapitalist peace faces not only the direct violence of war, but also the structural violence of the state and the market, which seek to reclaim territories where people organised themselves differently. And it demonstrates that this form of organisation was real enough, threatening enough to the established order, to be deemed worthy of destruction.

Despite the current situation in Rojava, the sense of everyday peace that cooperativism fosters among and within communities that I observed over the course of my fieldwork has led me to reflect more specifically on the role of cooperatives in post-conflict and peacebuilding contexts. In fact, for the past two years, peace negotiations are once again underway between the PKK and the Turkish state; one of my aims in writing this essay is to make the case for cooperatives to be on the agenda for a potential peace agreement. It is in this context that I became interested in the role cooperatives have played in Colombia, following the peace agreement in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP, the country’s largest rebel group.

The accord, signed after more than half a century of armed conflict, was described by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana as the most comprehensive of the 34 agreements signed worldwide since the end of the Cold War. Among its notable innovations was a proposal for the collective reincorporation of ex-combatants through cooperatives and other associative forms of a social economy.

The project must sustain itself within the capitalist market even as it attempts to transcend it

During negotiations, the FARC-EP had challenged the UN’s classic disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration model. The FARC’s primary argument against this model was that it prioritised individual adaptation to the labour market and that this amounted toaccepting the unjust order they had spent decades fighting. Instead, they proposed ‘reincorporation’ – a form of integration that recognised the political agency of signatories and their intention to continue the struggle for social transformation, now through civilian means.

This is how ECOMÚN (Economías Sociales del Común, or Social Economies of the Commons) came to be in 2017: a federation comprising approximately 6,200 peace-agreement signatories and 154 organisations across 26 of Colombia’s 33 administrative divisions. I attended its governing council assembly in 2024. What I found most significant about ECOMÚN was that none of its cooperatives – for coffee, cattle-ranching, fish-farming, textiles, rural tourism, to name a few – were composed exclusively of ex-combatants. Rather, they worked alongside peasant farmers, Indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians – local communities who share histories of exclusion and dispossession. ‘We have fostered connections between people,’ Juan Camilo Londoño, ECOMÚN’s executive director, told me. ‘There are even organisations that are not signatories but have joined ECOMÚN.’ Internally, the movement describes this as a ‘pedagogy of peace’: the transformation of former war territories into spaces where people on opposing sides of the conflict build productive projects together and, in doing so, weave new social relations.

Yet, as its own leaders acknowledge with clear-eyed honesty, ECOMÚN operates under a fundamental contradiction: the accord did not guarantee the anticapitalist transformation that genuine peace would have required. The question of land tenure – the heart of the FARC’s struggle for decades – was negotiated but never translated into terms that guaranteed real agrarian reform. The project must sustain itself within the capitalist market even as it attempts to transcend it. Its viability depends on volatile political conditions and on international cooperation, which frequently imposes its own neoliberal logics. And because it emerged from the peace agreement, it operates within Colombia’s legal framework and under direct oversight from state agencies. ECOMÚN, in other words, cannot claim Rojava’s autonomy: it is woven into state institutions rather than built in parallel to – or against – them. What self-management it achieves is real, but limited.

What Rojava and ECOMÚN have in common is not their context – one is a revolution in the midst of war; the other is a post-conflict process within a capitalist state – but their wager: that peace is built from below, when people recover control over their time and territories, their cultures and economies.

Both cases also demonstrate that real peace is inseparable from anticolonial and antiracist struggles. For decades, the Kurdish people were denied recognition as an ethnicity, forbidden from speaking their language, and dispossessed of everything that belonged to them: their identity, but also their subsistence economies, their ways of organising themselves, their ways of inhabiting the land. In Rojava, therefore, cooperatives are spaces where the social fabric torn apart by decades of forced assimilation is reconstituted, and where power over one’s own life is recovered. Meanwhile, in Colombia, ECOMÚN’s cooperatives are organised in territories where peasants, Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian communities have been, over centuries, systematically dispossessed of their lands. The pedagogy of peace that emerges from these initiatives goes beyond reconciling former enemies – it reconstitutes collective identities that the nation-state and the market had reduced to subalternity, and undoes the manufactured hostility between groups set against each other through systemic poverty and violence.

But it would be a mistake to read these experiences only as responses to extreme situations – as solutions for those living in war zones or conditions of severe poverty. That reading reproduces, perhaps without intending to, the very logic it criticises: the idea that the problem lies over there, in places that have not yet reached capitalist ‘normality’, and that the solution lies in economic development that will better integrate them into the logic of the market.

Peace is not a state reached by signing a document but a way of living together each day

The rhythm of life I observed in Rojava – working until 2.30-3 pm, then going to the assemblies – is precisely what capitalism denies to most people in the world, not just those living in conflict zones. The urban worker who leaves home before dawn and returns at night, too exhausted to speak with their children; the woman whose care work is invisible to the economy and the state, who never rests because her work never ends; the debt-ridden professional who works to pay for what they need to keep working; the young person who sees no horizon in the future; the children who grow up without spaces to play. All of them experience forms of violence that have no name in peace debates but are deeply felt in daily life.

The Guatemalan ex-combatant’s question – What now? – is a question that might be asked not only by someone who survived war but also anyone who works without knowing why, who consumes without feeling satisfied, and who lives with the sense that something essential has been taken from them. Cooperatives are not the only possible answer to that question, but they do propose something that the dominant peacebuilding paradigm – and the economic system that sustains it – systematically refuses to admit: that peace is not a state reached by signing a document but a way of living together each day, of recovering self-determination over one’s own time, needs and relationships, of asking the question How do we want to live? and believing that it can be answered through collective deliberation, by people themselves, without bosses or owners.

This is what the Guatemalan ex-combatant did not find when he came down from the mountains, and what the cooperatives of Rojava and Colombia are trying to build – under very different conditions, with enormous contradictions, but with a clarity about the goal that peace agreements signed in conference rooms rarely possess. Galtung proposed that we dismantle the structures of violence and called what remained ‘positive peace’ – but an anticapitalist peace does not just settle for the absence of structural violence, it dares to ask what should take its place. And it answers with bread baked by hand, milk shared before it is sold, assembly meetings where people still have time and energy to decide. It rests on a form of togetherness in which life itself is harmonious and worth wanting, built each day, from below, through real practice.

This essay is supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

hello guys, i’m looking to get a septorhinoplasty soon and im looking for a good doctor in slemani only! im looking for a barbie style nose but still quite natural and not ”pig” like. please drop the IG of any doctors you know, thanks!!

Hi Throwaway account ;

Im Kurdish and make Kurdish TikToks and I get a lot of comments of people - even non Kurds saying Kurds can speak freely in turkey , syria , Iraq and Iran . Or comments saying nobody was killed and it’s all lies and propaganda and that it happened to nobody etc. 

I was wondering if people could reply with things that happened to their family that involve d*ath, imprisonment , t*rture etc. And state what city / country it happened in so I could make like a post about it . Do not worry your usernames / profile pictures will be covered for confidentiality 

After 12 years of displacement; Residents of four villages in Rabia are returning to their homes.

After 12 years of displacement and separation from the land of his ancestors, 74-year-old Fazil, a native of the village of Mahmoudiya in the Rabia sub-district, has returned to his homeland. During the conflict with ISIS militants, their village had become a central battleground, forcing them to evacuate.

The returning residents are Arabs from the villages of Qahira, Mahmoudiya, Jadriya, and Saudiya, all located in the Rabia sub-district. In a formal ceremony, the Minister of Interior of the Kurdistan Regional Government welcomed their return.

Welcoming the Return of the Displaced

Rebar Ahmed, the Minister of Interior of the Kurdistan Regional Government, expressed his readiness to support the return of displaced individuals to their native regions and emphasized facilitating their resettlement.

The infrastructure of these villages was devastated by the war, with vehicles, homes, and buildings left in ruins. In response, the Nineveh Governorate has formed a specialized committee to oversee reconstruction and compensation in the area.

A Committee Established for Compensation and Reconstruction

Ghazwan Dawoodi, the First Deputy Governor of Nineveh, stated: "Efforts are underway to rebuild the villages and compensate those affected so that residents can resume their normal lives."

These four villages are under the security and protection of Peshmerga forces. In total, they comprise more than 1,000 families, most of whom had been displaced across the Duhok and Nineveh governorates in recent years.

https://rudaw.net/sorani/categories/iraq/1874241

I feel like Kurdistan is slowly being Arabized, and we're letting it happen in our own cities: Erbil, Slemani, and Duhok.

I remember going to Erbil Avenue to watch the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain. The person addressing the crowd was speaking Arabic alongside a Kurdish speaker. And this is in Erbil, at a place owned by a Kurd. How have we reached a point where Kurdish feels secondary in our own cities?

Look at Istanbul. Despite being one of the world's biggest tourist destinations, Turkish is everywhere. Yet international businesses come to Erbil and act as if they're opening in an Arab city. Arabic advertisements, Arabic signs, even Iraqi flags instead of any meaningful recognition of Kurdish identity. We need to stop accepting this as normal.

The situation with Ibrahim Al Selmi from Dubai Bling is another example. Instead of genuinely apologizing, he turned the backlash into a story about himself being the victim. Rather than addressing the Kurdish identity he offended, he made himself the victim of the Kurdish community. I'm tired of people turning our identity into a marketing strategy.

We need to make businesses understand that ignoring Kurdish comes at a cost.

I'm thinking of creating an Instagram or TikTok account dedicated to educating Kurds about Arabization and organizing boycotts of businesses that disregard our language and identity. Not because their owners or employees are Arab, but because they operate in Kurdish cities while failing to respect Kurdish. , and i want really partner to help me if you or anyone is interested DM me
we can together in here and on social media stop our language from being lost and start making people respect us

Businesses need to understand something: Kurds aren't temporary customers. We're the people who live here, work here, study here, and keep coming back. International brands should be more concerned about losing Kurdish customers than about making Arabic their default.

Arabic and English can exist here. But Kurdish must never become secondary in Kurdistan. If businesses want our money, they need to respect our identity. And if they refuse, we need to be willing to walk away.

Who even votes them at this point? Don't know thr stats, butnit feels like the msjority of their voters are elderly people above 60 and middle aged socialites.

This is becoming a problem, aside od both parties corruption, Kurdish boomers don't use the internet and can not comprehend how fucked up Turks and Arabs are.

This could explain why both parties still assume we sanitize both by letting them come into Kurdistan, even when they spit us in the eye, while propagating other neo liberal pet project that are out of touch with our new reality.

The same is case with the PKK, mostly old people who think its still thr 1970s.

This has alreay been a big issue when you look at europe. Take France and Macron's party for example, Germany's CDU and SPD, the US Democrats and GOP.

Their boomers are also stuck, make shitty decisions and the young have to seal with thr consequences.

Kurdistan must not make the same mistake.

Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi says 2,063 security checkpoints have been removed across Bakur.

• He was a former (local) boxer.

• He was a very close friend of Saddam Hussein from young age if not childhood.

• He have been head of multiple governmental structures or sports/youth associations.

• He Saddam's personal bodyguard for 22 years.

• Although he was loyal to Saddam at all costs, some people around Saddam (ex. Hussein Kamel) was against Sabah because of his ethnicity.

• He got under insight for 3 months because he has seen talking Kurdish with a local salesman in Slêmanî. (Some sources say he didn't know Kurdish) But it was clear that he was loyal to Saddam.

• At the end he got dismissed from all his powers and forced to retirement either because he gave an order of some kind of pardon to an Iraqi bussinesman but in reality Saddam didn't gave such consent or Sabah got in a discussion with Uday.

• He was a Feylî Kurd and Shia. (Some say he was a Soranî and Sunnî)

• In American Invasion of Iraq, U.S. troop interrogated him but turns out he doesn't know anything about Saddam's hiding place.

They hate us more than the 4 occupier states do. They think its ok for everyone to work with the west except the Kurds. They see us as Zionists, racists, USA/CIA proxies, Israel No 2.0 and so on. But they have zero problem with for example Turkey to host 3 American military bases and companies etc.

The Leftist circles are filled with Turks, Arabs and Persians who don't miss any debate about Kurds so they can convince people from other parts of the world that the Kurdish struggle is everything bad. I think we just can't compete with them. It's a simple matter of numbers and resources that we lack and they don't. We can't win.

I personally gave up on the Left years ago and never looked back. What do you think about them? Should we try to change their minds? Are any major groups among them that understand our situation?

Hello everyone, I have a question that I wanted to direct specifically to the Kurds from southern Kurdistan, as I think you have the best perspective on this.
In some parts of the wider Arab world and among most Arab nationalists groups Saddam Hussein is still glorified as a strong leader or a pan Arab hero. However, if you look at his actual track record, his rule was defined by massive military catastrophes:
He launched a brutal, ruinous war against Iran that ended in a stalemate.
He blundered into the invasion of Kuwait, completely isolating Iraq and leading to a crushing defeat by the US led coalition.
He was never able to completely crush the Peshmerga militarily, which ultimately led him to commit horrific atrocities and genocide against the Kurdish civilian population such as the Anfal campaign and the Halabja gas attack
Why do so many Arabs choose to ignore his atrocities and failures to celebrate him? I’d love to hear your thoughts

https://x.com/mjscadden

While Washington reduces its military footprint in the Middle East, China is investing in relationships with Kurdish communities and leadership. The United States risks losing influence with partners whose cooperation has supported American security and regional access for decades.

Chinese universities offer a revealing example. Peking University teaches Kurdish language and culture. Beijing Foreign Studies University’s new four-year Kurdish program covers language, culture, geography and history. Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani publicly welcomed the department in September.

These programs communicate something meaningful: your language, identity and community deserve sustained attention.

That recognition accompanies practical engagement. Erbil Governorate reports that more than 1,500 employees have benefited from training in China, alongside scholarships and expanding commercial cooperation. Educational exchanges build relationships with people who may later shape government policy, business decisions and public opinion.

What Washington stands to lose

The consequences could extend well beyond cultural influence:

• Security cooperation: trust, local knowledge, intelligence relationships and access that become harder to sustain when partners question American staying power.
• Commercial opportunities: relationships that help shape energy, infrastructure and technology contracts.
• Regional credibility: decisions about Kurdish partners also signal to other communities how durable U.S. commitments are.

CENTCOM’s September 30 departure from Erbil Air Base makes sustained engagement particularly important. The transition to bilateral defense relations, alongside continuing operations in Syria, leaves Washington with choices about how to preserve those relationships.

Kurdish leaders have their own interests and alternatives. If American engagement becomes inconsistent, they have reasons to diversify their partnerships.

China does not need to promise independence

The strongest evidence of this outreach is in Iraqi Kurdistan. It does not establish a wholesale Kurdish realignment toward Beijing.

China also continues to emphasize state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Cultural recognition should not be mistaken for a commitment to Kurdish independence.

But Beijing can still gain goodwill by showing up consistently, recognizing Kurdish identity and offering tangible opportunities. Washington should understand how much those actions can matter.

A practical U.S. response

Congress and the administration should pursue a sustained Kurdish engagement strategy, supported by a senior official—ideally a U.S. Special Envoy for Kurdish Affairs.

That strategy should preserve practical security relationships, expand academic and commercial partnerships, and provide meaningful support for Kurdish cultural rights and self-government. Congressional backing can help make those commitments more durable.

The United States has invested heavily in its Kurdish partnerships. Allowing those relationships to weaken while competitors cultivate them would carry lasting geopolitical and economic costs.

As a kurd what do you think of turkmen?

Kurdistan Centre for Arts and Culture is creating an archive for rare manuscripts while supporting artists and documenting Kurdish contributions to the region’s cultural history.

I really want to learn Kurdish, but I haven't been able to find an app or website that offers high-quality learning materials yet. I found the Silq app, but the spoken language is generated by AI, which distorts the Kurdish pronunciation.

Is there anyone here who has taught themselves Kurdish, and what resources did you use? Do you know of any apps, websites, or books?

Hey everyone I have created a channel for Kurmanci contents. I hope you guys like it and if you have any feedbacka I would really appreciate as I'm Sorani speaker and my Kurmanci still struggle yet.

https://youtu.be/oZD0Qn2zeWk?is=8zAA-aSkYXSg839G

MP Murad Ismael says YBS fighters will join several Iraqi security bodies, including the police, not only the PMF. PM Ali al-Zaidi had described it as a PMF absorption.

The IRGC says it hit a "strategic" PJAK meeting and training site after a week of drone strikes and clashes with YRK fighters around Shaho and Marivan. It gave no location or casualties.

It is no hidden secret that kurds are oppressed by four Muslim countries and there are rising relations with non Muslim countries such as Kyriakos Velopoulos founder of the Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution) in 2016 who said the "we ask the Greek forgien minister to support an independent kurdistan" and demanded that the Greek government and Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias abandon standard neutral diplomatic wording and openly back Kurdish statehood and Dr. Dr. Spyridon Plakouda stated that "Kurdistan is the future of the middle east"

Israel provided Barzani with a massive monthly stipend (reported at around $50,000 to $100,000 per month) alongside medical supplies, training camps, and communications gear, Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel routed large stockpiles of captured Soviet armaments directly to Barzani’s forces via intermediaries, while Mullah Mustafa Barzani visited Israel twice—once in 1968 and again in 1973—meeting directly with Mossad Chiefs Meir Amit and Zvi Zamir, as well as Israeli Prime Minister and in 2017 israel was the only country who supported the referendum

They even captured Abdullah ocalan for us who are of anti kurdish independence so i guess they really do support our independence.....

I really wonder what the non kurds think about this in the subreddit

I often wonder, and I've even found and published some lost media, why political leaders like Bafel or Nechirvan Barzani don't post photos from the 2000s? I've posted many of them on my channel, And many times supporters of the puk have complimented me for having such a large archive but my point is many media even of the Kurdish battles historical facts are very complicated to find, It would be a good idea for someone to open a channel or a site with unpublished media, what do you think?

Acclaimed journalist and human rights defender Nurcan Baysal offers a powerful and deeply personal account of what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey. She chronicles a period of renewed conflict that profoundly affected Kurdish comm-unities, while exploring issues of discrimination, identity, language rights, and political struggle.

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Notes From Diyarbakir

NURCAN BAYSAL

Acclaimed journalist and human rights defender Nurcan Baysal offers a powerful and deeply personal account of what it means to be Kurdish in Turkey. She chronicles a period of renewed conflict that profoundly affected Kurdish comm-unities, while exploring issues of discrimination, identity, language rights, and political struggle.

As new efforts toward dialogue and peace emerge, WRITING RESISTANCE provides an essential guide to understanding the recent history, lived realities, and future challenges of the Kurdish question.

Compelling, courageous, and urgent, WRITING RESISTANCE is both a witness to recent history and a call for justice, recognition, and lasting peace.

REVIEWS

‘Nurcan Baysal has shown how to act as an intellectual under difficult conditions in dark times, always standing on the side of truth, and despite threats and oppression, she has persistently continued to speak and write. She is a rare voice for our times.’
– Burhan Sonmez, President, PEN International

‘A compassionate book that opens completely different windows to look at the Kurdish issue, the village and the villager, the educated and the uneducated, development and poverty, life as a whole.’
– goodreads reviewer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish human rights defender, journalist and writer.

She was born and grew up in Diyarbakır. She has worked for poverty and development programs at the United Nations Development Programme and various other non-governmental organizations. Following the ISIS attacks in 2014 she volunteered for the establishment of Yazidi camps in Northern Iraq and Turkey. Baysal is a founder of the Diyarbakır Institute for Political and Social Research (DISA), the Development Centre Association in Diyarbakır and the Platform to Save Women Kidnapped by ISIS. She is also one of the Middle East advisors of the Global Fund for Women and the Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism.

Among her books are three non-fiction works, O Gün (That Day), Ezidiler: 73. Ferman

(Ezidis: The 73rd Decree), O Sesler (Those Voices-Diyarbakır: A City Under Siege, published

online in English by 60pages), a book of short-stories, Yok Zamanı (The Time

of Nothingness) and a research she co-authored with Şeyhmus Diken, Kürdistan’da Sivil

Toplum (Civil Society in Kurdistan).

Since 2013, Baysal has been featured as a columnist in various newspapers and media outlets. Her articles focus on human rights violations, poverty, refugees, humanitarian issues and the Kurdish question. She is a member of PEN Turkey and an honorary member of English PEN.

Baysal won the Women’s World Summit Foundation (WWSF) Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life in 2010 and the “Turkey’s Changemakers” award in 2012 for her work in poverty alleviation. In 2017, she was awarded the “Brave Women Journalists Award” presented by the Italian Women Journalists Association. In 2018, she was named Global Laureate for Human Rights Defenders at Risk by Front Line Defenders. She also received the Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award in 2020.

https://www.aurorametro.com/product/writing-resistance/?v=7885444af42e

"One of the most striking findings under this heading is that the proportion of those who do not adhere to any religion is significantly higher among Kurdish youth compared to the national average in Türkiye. While this rate 10 percent or lower in nationwide youth surveys, 17.5 percent of Kurdish youth identify themselves as atheist, deist, agnostic, or similar"

https://kurdish-studies.org/en/kurdish-youth-similarities-and-differences/ I think it is myth that Kurds are religious. What is your opinion about the study? The organisation is very reliable and operates inside Turkey.

Quote from the page:

Hello, my name is Fatah Mostafa, and I am reaching out to you today as a father because we urgently need help for our 13-year-old son.

In December 2024, our lives changed. Our son broke his left upper arm. At first, we thought it was a normal bone fracture. However, during the examinations, the doctors discovered that the bone in that area had been severely weakened by a tumor. The diagnosis was osteosarcoma (bone cancer) in his left upper arm. As parents, this news was unimaginable for us. Our son had just turned 11 years old.

The doctors initially started him on chemotherapy. Over a period of three months, our son received a total of six chemotherapy sessions. Unfortunately, the treatment did not have the desired effect. Instead of shrinking, the tumor actually grew larger.

On March 27, 2025, the affected part of his upper arm bone, including the head of the upper arm bone, ultimately had to be removed and replaced with a prosthesis. Following the surgery, he underwent another 12 chemotherapy sessions.

In October 2025, examinations sadly revealed that metastases had already developed in his lungs. On October 21, 2025, he underwent lung surgery. Unfortunately, further examinations revealed additional metastases. As a result, further operations were performed on April 10, 2026, and August 7, 2026, after new metastases were discovered.

About two weeks after the most recent operation, new changes were once again detected in his lungs. Our son was also experiencing pain in his right arm. The doctors therefore decided to carry out a full-body examination.

The results once again shattered our world as a family: the cancer had spread further throughout his body.

The doctors have told us that, unfortunately, there is nothing more they can do with the treatment options currently available to save our son. He is now in a palliative situation.

This news broke our hearts as parents. Nevertheless, we did not want to give up. For weeks, we have been searching for additional treatment options that might still be able to help our son.

In the meantime, we have found some options that we would like to pursue. Unfortunately, these are private treatments that are not covered by health insurance.

At the same time, my wife and I are unable to work for health reasons. This means that we cannot cover the costs on our own.

That is why we are wholeheartedly asking you for your help. Every donation, no matter how large or small, can help us finance further treatment.

Thank you to every single person who supports us, donates, or shares our story. Your help means more to our family than words can express.

Fatah Mostafa

1. Kajal: 17
2. Qumriya: 14
3. Nasrin: 21
4. Khadija: 23
5. Kwestan: 13
6. Sirwa: 17
7. Fatimah: 21
8. Raziyah: 15
9. Mahabad: 18
10. Aisha: 19
11. Kafiyah: 21
12. Bahar: 15
13. Khadijah: 18