Once again, we are in Rojava, the carnal homeland of the Kurds of Syria. This time, to celebrate with them the tenth anniversary of the autonomy of their region conquered in 2012 on the Damascus regime, during the “Arab Spring”. A high voltage birthday. If the Kurdish earth is heated white by an implacable sun, it is even more so by the repeated announcements of Turkey of a new and imminent invasion. It would be the fourth in six years – and so far, the threats of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have always been effective. Everything shows that the leader of Ankara remains determined to put an end to the Kurds, as they fiercely oppose his expansionist projects as to his will to reinstall the Islamists on their territory.
In each city of the immense plain which runs from the tiger to the Euphrates, these mythical rivers of the old Mesopotamia, the Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies of the Syrian Democratic Forces (FDS) celebrate this anniversary against the backdrop of disarray. If all remember their victory against Daesh [the Arab acronym of the Islamic State organization, IS] – when we, French, fully supported them within the international coalition -, they do not forget for As much as the 36,000 killed and injured as it cost them to overcome our common enemy. So, they honor their dead with emotion, but wonder what human price they will still have to consent if, as in the fall of 2019, we abandon them in the hands of Turkey, our NATO ally who knows how to play so well His position in the Ukrainian conflict to impose his immediate views to us, to the detriment of our long -term interests.
Everywhere in Rojava, we are preparing with sadness but determination for a new deadly war, whose beginnings are the countless abuses to which the Turks are delivered from their border: bombardment of villages, schools, cemeteries, churches and targeted assassinations of military officials by drones who keep traveling the sky. Seven of these leaders, including a majority of women, were killed just in our stay of ten days, at the end of July.
indifference
On Kurdish social networks, these events are often reported with a title tinged with tragic irony, as they take place in indifference from all over the world: “Turkey completes the Kurds well.”
How did we get there? It all started well though. Between the famous Battle of Kobane, in 2014, and the fall of the Caliphate, at the end of 2018 – with the annihilation of Rakka, its capital, in 2017 -, the territories conquered on Daesh by the FDS, with the support of the coalition carried out By the Americans, had extended to a surface equal to four times that of Lebanon. Summer 2019 had been the highlight of this liberating epic: after years of merciless combat, peace finally reigned and a new society settled, led by what we had started to call the “Autonomous administration of the North and East of Syria”.
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