In the following I will give a short insight about my experiences during the time with the economic committee of the cantons of Qamişlo and Hasakah in Rojava, North-East Syria. I will especially focus on the cooperative economy that is being built up in Rojava. As a second step, I will discuss to what extend
The ideology of the Kurdish liberation movement contemplates ecologism as one of its fundamental pillars. Even so, owing to nine years of war, barriers remain to its implementation.
In past years, the ancient city of Hasankeyf attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, offering them the chance to explore the traces of more than 20 civilizations that contributed to the city’s cultural heritage. Hasankeyf – with a history spanning 12,000 years – held a special appeal to visitors from the region as well as to those from western Turkey and every corner of the globe, and this enabled local residents not only to provide for their families but also to share their specialized knowledge of this historic landscape.
Some families who fled from Afrin to Shehba have joined forces and planted over a million olive trees.
In the Cizire region of northeastern Syria, 700 women from the autonomously organized women's structures of the Social Defense Forces are involved in patrols to protect against arson.
“In the liberated areas, every harvest is a revolutionary act. Our enemies aim to destroy the revolution by starving us – through embargo, arson, and violence. The collectivised lands we harvested this week lie in the shadow of a militarised imperialist border that divides the Kurdish people from each other, and in sight of fields
[On 5 June 2020] a fire started in a field near the International Commune. It’s unclear if it was started deliberately or accidentally. Last year ISIS sleeper cells and other Turkish proxies waged a brutal campaign of arson against crop fields in Rojava. Many thousands of acres of wheat were lost, and a number of
Turkey, with the help of its GAP dam system, has again reduced the flow of the Euphrates. Less than a third of the prescribed amount of water now flows into Syria and Iraq.
A lot happened since our last picture gallery published only one month ago. During those weeks, we notably went to a village called Rêhanik to help Kurdish friends there to build a new communal park where families from the village can gather to spend time together. But we mostly focused on the plantation of vegetables
“How do you treat the nature, how people are treated, how our interior is treated, that is where the health debate starts.”
“We are the people of Mesopotamia, one of the most remarkable areas of the world, known as the cradle of civilization. We are the people of Hasankeyf in Turkey and of the Marshes in Iraq. We are connected and combined by the Tigris River. The Tigris is our common root, our common lifeline and our common future.”
In the women's village of Jinwar in northern Syria, the residents are preparing fields and gardens for the next growing season. In times of crisis it becomes clear how fundamental the possibility of self-sufficiency is.
