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Ten years from Kobane, Kurdish resistance continues

In the middle of the square, on the gray pavement, a human tide in a thousand colors answered with one thunderous voice: “Long live Kobane, long live the SDF!”

Ten years from Kobane, Kurdish resistance continues
Chiara Cruciati, Giansandro MerliKOBANE, Syria
7 min read

“We are here to celebrate 10 years of the liberation of Kobane from the Islamic State. We defeated it, and if necessary, we will defeat it again and again.” 

Aya spoke with a proud look on her face, surrounded by the crowd that on Sunday, January 26 was celebrating the anniversary of the battle that changed the history of northeastern Syria. Aya is Kurdish, 55 years old and with her head covered by a colorful veil. During the fight for resistance in the town, a few kilometers from the Turkish border, she lost a son and many loved ones. One of her daughters is enlisted in the YPJ, the women's self-defense units. “It is of enormous importance that so many of us women have fought on the front lines against Islamist militiamen, after all we have been forced to endure.”

On the same day in 2015, the YPG and YPJ announced the liberation of the city; a few hours earlier, the Kurdish flag was once again flying atop Mishtenur Hill. Four months after the Islamic State began its occupation on September 16, 2014, Kobane could finally rise again, in freedom. The town had seen weeks of street-by-street fighting and bombardment by the International Coalition (which was established in August of that year after the Islamist massacre of the Yazidis in Shengal). Despite the brutal siege, starvation, and more than 1,100 people killed, an unstoppable popular resistance had turned the town into a symbol, into “the Stalingrad of Syria.”

The resistance was supported by a global movement of solidarity, which got to discover Rojava and the revolution inspired by the project of democratic confederalism theorized by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its founder Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned for nearly 26 years on the Turkish island of Imrali.

“Victory against ISIS simply means one thing: freedom. For us women and for us Kurds. Before, we had to hide; thanks to the resistance of this town, the whole world has gotten to know us,” Sawsan says. She is 32 years old and is there with her 13-year-old daughter, Jiyana: “I am a student and I’m going to school in our language. Before, it was forbidden to even speak it. What happened here was important for our people and for the whole world.”

Kobane was the starting point for the march of the self-defense units – Kurdish, Arabic, Assyrian, Turkmen, and Yazidi – united under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces: month after month, the SDF wrested territory from the Islamic State, which at the height of its expansion had taken a third of Syria, and dealt it the final blow in Baghuz on March 23, 2019. The Italian international fighter Lorenzo Orsetti, known as “Bear,” had fallen on that front just four days earlier.

At 11 a.m., the square dedicated to Commander Egit was packed for the commemoration. At the far end, a bronze statue on a dark marble plinth commemorates the man who in 1984 “fired the first bullet of the PKK”: the start of the armed struggle in Turkey had just been announced, after the fighters had returned from Lebanon where they had taken part in the resistance against the Israeli invasion. Someone brought flags of the organization, red with a star on a yellow background in the center, although the Northeast Syria Autonomous Administration had asked everyone not to do so.

A short distance away from the statue, giant writing on a wall reads “Jin, jihan, azadi”: “Woman, life, freedom.” From the roof of the building next door, the asaysh, the region's internal security forces, watched over the crowd, holding their Kalashnikovs tightly. All around, women and men in the same green uniforms are keeping an eye on all entrances with weapons in hand: the situation is quiet, but they can’t let their guard down. If one looks out far behind them, one can catch a glimpse of the ruined houses, never rebuilt so that they would remain a memorial, like an open-air museum.

In the middle of the square, on the gray pavement, a human tide in a thousand colors – women, men, elderly and children, whole families, many in traditional dress, Kurdish and Arab – answered with one thunderous voice to the slogans that Farhan Haj Issa, co-president of the Euphrates canton, chanted from the stage: “Long live Kobane, long live the SDF!” So much emotion is conveyed by the firmness of Haj Issa's tone, making the air resonate and the square vibrate as one body.

“Long live the resistance at the dam!” is a slogan chanted by several of the speakers. The dam in question is the one at Tishreen, on the Euphrates River, 76 kilometers to the south: a vital piece of infrastructure for supplying water and energy throughout the Northeast. 

“At this point I am forced to buy water from cisterns and there are frequent power outages. This makes everything more difficult,” says Mohammed, 35, who lives in Kobane and is a blacksmith. For weeks, hundreds of civilians have been going to guard the dam, defending it with their bodies. There have already been 18 casualties: Turkish drones are attacking it, even though the last real open front in Syria is ten kilometers to the west. There, the SDF are fighting the patchwork of Islamist militias gathered under the self-styled Syrian National Army (SNA), backed by Ankara. If the dam were to fall in Turkish hands, the city would once again be encircled on all sides. If Tishreen falls, Kobane falls.

Meanwhile, an international delegation is speaking from the stage. “We will ask Macron to remove the PKK from the lists of international terrorist organizations and lift the state secrecy on the murder of three Kurdish political leaders in Paris, Sakine Cangiz, Fidan Dogan and Leila Sailemez,” says French Deputy Danielle Simonnett. With Deputy Thomas Portes (LFI) and three Paris city councilors, they represent all parties of the New Popular Front in France. From Italy, there are representatives of local institutions: Amedeo Ciaccheri, president of Rome’s 8th Municipality, and Roberto Eufemia, councilor of the Metropolitan City of Rome, both from the Ecologist Civic Left. In his speech, Ciaccheri went back in time to where everything started: “Italy's ties with Kurdistan date back almost three decades, since Öcalan arrived in Rome,” seeking refuge, which the Italian authorities denied him. Then everyone sings Bella Ciao together, in Italian from the stage and in Kurdish from the square. It’s time to dance. After war, there is always a desire to dance: in concentric circles, hand in hand, the dancing mixed with hugs.

A little later, Asia, who is 30 years old and wears the asaysh uniform, called on the international community and European countries to ensure that the regime change in Damascus would protect the rights of women and minorities. “We know Al Jolani's past, it was marked by rape and violence. We know what he really intends to do with women: exclude us from political life, force us to cover our heads and wear black. We are not going to take any step back. We will not allow him to come here and rule over us,” she said with an implacable look. Then she pointed to the white circles that had appeared in the sky: “There are so many threats against Kobane and the whole autonomous region. Like that plane flying over our heads. It wants to spread fear, especially among children. But we have no more fear here.”

On the streets of the city, stencils of Öcalan's face can be seen on almost every wall. A few kilometers away from the center, cultivated fields and olive trees bring a swathe of green to a land that a little further east becomes an enormous desert plain. Among the olive groves is the cemetery of the martyrs of the resistance: a large glass building with a red star at the top and a well-tended expanse of light-colored marble tombstones that seem to go on forever. One is struck by the young age of most of the fallen fighters, many of them born in the late 1990s. Inscriptions in Kurdish and Arabic are intermingled with graves without names or faces: here are the bodies of those who died in battle and were never identified because they were unrecognizable, recovered at the front or from mass graves, and fighters with family in Turkey who must be protected from persecution by the Turkish authorities.

Some of the graves don’t yet have the marble structure that protects the coffins: these belong to the fallen on the front lines west of Tishreen. “These people have died in the last month,” a girl tells us, pointing to the unpaved area where the martyrs' photos are surrounded by stones and flowers. There are 132 of them. A little further on, three men are at work leveling another area for the cemetery. “There must always be available space,” they explain. ”The resistance is not over yet.”


Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/dieci-anni-come-kobane on 2025-01-28
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