Emergency Committee for Rojava

[THREAD] 1/ Today, a number Kurdish political parties gathered to voice concerns over the “Syrian People’s Assembly elections,” questioning whether the process reflects inclusive political representation.

Turkey’s Kurdish peace initiative is entering a more structured phase, with public confirmation of state talks with the PKK leadership and new institutional proposals from nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli. ✍️ @serpgnes theamargi.com/posts/hope-kur…

Senior Rojava official Elham Ahmed said that studying the Kurdish language for only two hours per week as an elective module, in keeping with Syrian education ministry guidelines, is "not right," stressing "Kurds should study their mother tongue," Rojava-based media reported on Sunday

#New: What does Öcalan’s “democratic integration” really mean? Joost Jongerden writes on Öcalan’s call to move beyond armed struggle, the limits of Turkey’s “terror-free Turkey” framing, & the Kurdish search for democratic politics beyond the nation-state. theamargi.com/posts/longread…

Join us May 30th for the launch of our 📚Summer Study Group Series 📚 The Colonization of Kurdistan: History, Political Economy, and Gender, which we are co-hosting with our friends @CityKurds and the Kurdish Gender Studies Network. RSVP: defendrojava.org/events/summer-…

Bad news on YPJ integration. Also, this is a nonsensical claim. There's no Syrian law restricting military posts to men, and the Constitutional Declaration guarantees equality before the law and state institutions. So why would women need a separate legal framework?

📢This Friday, May 15. 📚Spread the word with your fellow students, educators, and scholars! Join the discussion about how we can support and defend Rojava's autonomous and democratic educational institutions! 🤝

YPJ commander Newroz Ahmed says that within the Syrian Ministry of Defense some male commanders from the SDF have taken positions with the Syrian army. "But we as the YPJ are still continuing our struggle. As an outcome of this, we need more meetings to continue with the Syrian Ministry of Defense."

The subject of the week in Kurdish media is the importance of Kurdish-language education. "The generation being educated in their mother tongue today will lead this society tomorrow," says academic @guldive.

"These groups cover the political spectrum from staunch Kurdish nationalists who welcome U.S. action against Iran, to leftists who say attempted U.S.-Israeli exploitation of Kurdish aspirations is “poisoning” their movement...." ICYMI: My feature report from Iraqi Kurdistan

طلاب جامعة روج آفا ينظمون مسيرة للمطالبة بالاعتراف باللغة الكردية

On Friday, 232 detainees affiliated with the SDF were released by the Syrian transitional government as part of the ongoing integration process. However, sources say some individuals listed as released remain unaccounted for, with families still unaware of their fate.

Syriac is being taught as an elective in schools in Qamishli in Rojava. In January, the Syrian president signed a decree recognizing Kurdish as a national language, a move that has renewed calls for broader recognition of other languages. READ MORE: Rudaw.net/english/middle…

Kurds in Iran and Turkey have been demanding equal status for the Kurdish language for a century, and they never had it to begin with. A generation of Syrian Kurds knows nothing else. This isn't going to be a few days of clashes over signs. It will be a long-term social issue.

It’s hard to get editors here to care about Rojava or Myanmar but it’s beautiful to see the free women in both places caring about each other. ✌️

I spent 2 weeks in Iraqi Kurdistan for @truthdig, meeting a complex network of exiled Iranian Kurdish forces. USA + Israel seek to exploit the geopolitically-friendless Kurds. But Kurdish leaders know any further escalation could hurt them most of all: truthdig.com/articles/kurds…

Tensions in Hasakah today after the government removed the Kurdish language from public signage -- despite its designation as a 'national language' of Syria.

Women all over the world joining the Campaign #WeAreAllYPJ Messages from Kongra Star in Sulemaniya und ZENDA e.V. - Kurdish Women's Information Office

"From Chinram to Rojava and across the world, the women's revolution is a shared struggle." The free women WITCH (Women Internationalists of the Chin Hill, Myanmar) expressing their solidarity and support for YPJ. #WeAreAllYPJ

On the fourth of May, 1937, the Council of Ministers in Ankara issued a secret decree authorising a military campaign against Dersim, a mountainous province in northern Kurdistan, within the borders of eastern Turkey, whose Kurdish Alevi population had long maintained a partial, geography-given autonomy from the central state. Over the next sixteen months, the Turkish army moved through the region with infantry, aircraft, and poison gas. Villages were burned. Caves where families had taken shelter were sealed at the entrances or filled with smoke. Tens of thousands of people were killed; thousands more were deported to the west of the country, and Kurdish girls from Dersim were sent to a boarding school in Elazığ where their names were changed and they were raised as Turks. The province itself was renamed Tunceli, meaning "bronze fist," after the military operation that had been conducted there. Eşliye Çiçe was a child when the soldiers came to her village. She survived by lying still beneath her mother, who did not. Her testimony, recorded decades later as part of the Dersim 1937–38 Tertele Oral History Project, is one of more than three hundred. The film above is built around her words. Eighty-nine years on, what happened in Dersim has been called many things by the Turkish state: an incident, a tragedy, a regrettable episode of the early Republic. It has not been called a genocide. The archives remain closed. The mountain Eşliye names, Hopik, is now marked on Turkish maps as Beyaz Dağ, the White Mountain. The names of the dead were never recorded.