The Kurds’ democratic resistance to ISIS demonstrates that anti-fascism cannot be separated from the wider struggle against capitalism, patriarchy and the state. By Dilar Dirik It was in the fall of 2014, only months after the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) made massive territorial gains inside Syria and Iraq, committing genocidal and feminicidal massacres, that a…
Category: PAJK | YJA-STAR
Thoughts on Rojava : An Interview with Janet Biehl
Full of admiration, but not without critique: Janet Biehl shares some of her ideas on the Rojava revolution after her recent visits to the region. Janet Biehl Zanyar Omrani In this interview, independent filmmaker and journalist Zanyar Omrani talks to Janet Biehl about her late companion Murray Bookchin, her trips to Rojava and the important…
Yazidi Women : From Genocide to Resistance
By Dilar Dirik The old Kurdish saying “We have no friends but the mountains” became more relevant than ever when on Aug. 3, 2014, the murderous Islamic State group launched what is referred to as the 73rd massacre on the Yazidis by attacking the city of Sinjar (in Kurdish: Shengal), slaughtering thousands of people, and…
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
By Janet Biehl In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in Kenya, Murray Bookchin was living with me in Burlington, Vermont. We watched Öcalan’s capture on the news reports. He sympathized with the plight of the Kurds—he said so whenever the subject came up—but he saw Öcalan as yet another Marxist-Leninist…
The Philosophy that Inspired the Kurdish Resistance
Bookchin’s municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike, have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy. Joris Leverink for Roar Mag The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015), explains how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants…
The Women Combatants of Rojava
Interviews with commanders Abdullah and Rangin of the YPJ (Women’s Defence Units) Isis chose the beginning of Ramadan to launch an attack on Kobane in an attempt to retake the city liberated by the Kurdish resistance this past January. No sooner was the attack repelled than Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan began brandishing his scimitar…
Kurdish Women’s Radical Self-Defense: Armed and Political
By Dilar Dirik The Kurdish women’s resistance operates without hierarchy and domination and is part of larger, societal transformation and liberation. The world’s powerful institutions operate through the state-structure, which has the ultimate monopoly on decision-making, economy, and the use of force. At the same time, we are told that today’s prevalent violence is the…
Feminism and the Kurdish Freedom Movement
By Dilar Dirik This article is an edited version of a presentation at the “Dissecting Capitalist Modernity–Building Democratic Confederalism” Conference at Hamburg University, April 3-5th, 2015. The fact that we are discussing the Kurdish freedom movement’s approaches, ideas, and re-conceptualizations of freedom today at this conference with people from so many diverse backgrounds is quite…
Kurdish Women’s Unknown History of Struggle
The Kurdish women’s history of struggle is not a recent phenomenon. The last generation of Kurdish women grew up recognizing women fighters as a natural element of Kurdish identity. But before that, in the late nineteenth century, there was Kara Fatma, a Kurdish woman who led a battalion of almost 700 men in the Ottoman…
Revolutionary Women: Zapatista and YPJ-STAR Embrace New Gender Politics
By Charlotte Maria Sáenz “…revolutionary struggles cannot achieve collective liberation for all people without addressing patriarchy, nor can women’s freedom be disentangled from racial, economic, and social justice.” “Zapatista women have participated at all levels of the movement to fight for justice and dignity for the indigenous people of Chiapas and, at the same time,…
Peacebuilding as Counter-Insurgency | Self-Determination vs Global ‘Counter-Terror’ Operations
CAMPACC: Peacebuilding as counter-insurgency by Dr Vicki Sentas The Kurdish movement is well acquainted with the effects of the global listing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation. In many ways the listing regime is an extension of Turkey’s counter-insurgency approach to the armed conflict. That is, listing is a form of…
The Kurdistan Woman’s Liberation Movement
By Delal Afsin Nurhak In Kurdistan to be Kurdish was banned, to be Kurdish was made to be a source of shame. This for women meant no identity and a deeper exploitation of labour; persecution and violence had become fate. Kurdistan is multi-colonial. Kurdistan is not a state, but it is proud to be the…
