Even once you’ve made it across the border from Syria, you’re still a long way from safety. Turkish border police are hunting migrants all over the border region. And they do what they want with those they catch.
As we were leaving the camp, locals confronted us, asking why we were helping the Syrians. They did not know about the three-month-old baby who had died right next door to them.
The more allies Erdoğan loses in his state apparatus, the more he has to rely on radical groups on the street to secure his power.
Protests and provocations help to undermine the legitimacy of Erdoğan’s regime, revealing its authoritarianism and making it harder for the EU and US to avert their gaze.
A brief, though rich, glance into a Yezidi refugee camp near Diyarbakir in early 2016.
When we told the two co-mayors how shocked we were at the destruction in Cudi, they laughed bitterly: “Cudi? That’s nothing compared to Zap, Basak, and Barbaros.”
“What we experienced in Bakur, how it feels and how it will change us, has to do with real people and their stories.”
It is conceivable that any movement towards Russia would sharply reduce sympathy in the West for Rojava, without anything about its political and social project having changed.
“Both reactionary forces–Daesh and Turkish fascism–have to be combated in order to hope for a radical change in Turkey.”
It is not easy to overturn the influence of 500 years of Turkish authority during which people have been marginalized, isolated and treated with utter disrespect. To change all of this requires a lot of work on the ground, and on the individual level as well. But what is promising is the zeal and determination of the activists in the area.
