“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.
Women are leading the campaign to make Raqqa green.
Natalie Szarek is currently in Rojava, North Eastern Syria, participating in ecological work and learning from the work of the revolution, which is based on radical democracy, ecological sustainability and gender liberation. Before transplanting to Rojava, Natalie was involved in the ecological food movement in London, including coordinating the Community Food Growers Network, founding Audacious Veg CIC, and working in various community gardening projects. This is the first in a series of articles where she will attempt to apply the experiences and perspectives of the revolutionary movement in Rojava to the community growing and food sovereignty movement in England.
After the first snow since four years in February, spring has come to Rojava and we are happy that we could start again our ecological work at the internationalist commune. In the last months we were not able to do practical work because of the war, so there‘s a lot to do. In the last
Access to the 12,000-year-old settlement of Hasankeyf is now only possible with a special permit. The cultural site in Northern Kurdistan is flooded by the Ilisu dam on the Tigris. With it a unique history is lost.
Last March, a reforestation campaign was launched in the northern Syrian town of Raqqa, which had been destroyed by the ISIS terror regime. Since then, around 100,000 olive trees have been planted throughout the city.
