All of a sudden, the door to one of the bedrooms bursts open, and a comrade shouts, “Wake up! There is a fire outside!”
If Reber Apo, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish liberation movement, was a gardener, I would expect his garden to be colourful and wild, spilling out beyond its borders, a glorious mixture of vegetables, trees, flowers and vines. Drawing on his writings on political transformation, I imagine him to be a permaculturalist, creating gardens based on the wisdom of nature.
Turkey has started filling a huge hydroelectric dam on the Tigris River, a lawmaker and activists said, despite protests that it will displace thousands of people, the rising waters of the dam are also expected to eventually submerge the 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf.
The Agriculture Directorate of the Economic Committee in al-Tabqa is currently rehabilitating the agricultural site of Abu Qubea, which is estimated at 135 hectares due to the destruction and negligence when mercenaries controlled the site.
But this summer, the people of Rojava received a terrible new blow. Sleeping cells of jihadist gangs started to set fire to its first source of food and income: the wheat and barley fields that cover most of Rojava’s surface. Because of this, more than 40,000 hectares of cereals were lost, huge natural areas got also devastated and the estimated money loss reaches more than 33,000,000 dollars! This is a very serious attack to all nature and life in the region both economically and ecologically. Today, Rojava needs our support more than ever!
Thousands of decares of cultivated lands have been burned down by the Turkish state and their allied gangs in the last two months in the Kobane Canton. The vile attack against nature was documented by ANHA’s aerial photos.
Our trees and gardens continue growing, and we were able to make the harvest of several vegetables in our gardens. We had been working on a wider and more systematic irrigation system that now is finished, and even if it is not very aesthetic, it allows us to save time efforts when watering all the trees. We also finished the canalization for our black water system, and now we will continue our researches on how to develop an effective water purification system for the black water.
As part of the efforts to make Shehba and its villages greener, the people of Afrin have implemented a project for 4,000 saplings with support from the Agriculture Committee. Ornamental plants and saplings for fig, Aleppo pistachio, grape and rose trees. Shehba Agriculture Committee Member Basel Osman said, “Our fundamental goal is to turn the lands ravaged by the invading Turkish state and their allied gangs back into good places to live.”
In Article 2 of its Social Contract, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria declares that it is “based on a democratic and ecological system and on the freedom of women”. In Article 57, democracy is the “way of achieving the balance between economics and ecology”. Giving such importance to ecology in a direct democracy based
In the first half of May, the area surrounding our academy was still green. The temperatures were staying below 30 degree Celsius and we managed to spend most of the day outside taking care of our gardens and finishing up the last bits of tree planting. We also opened a completely new area, where we planted mostly olive trees.
Just two days after the 3rd Global Days of Action for Hasankeyf, on 10th June 2019, the news spread that the filling of the Ilisu Dam reservoir has been postponed. The responsible state agency DSI (State Hydraulic Works) declared to several media agencies that due to high river flow at the Ilisu dam site and
An action took place in the city of Qamislo in Rojava as part of the global action day of the climate movement, “FridaysForFuture.” Together with the city administration of Qamislo, internationalists from Make Rojava Green Again demonstrated with students of the Rojava University and cleaned up the city.
