Indifference to Rojava's struggle a prime example of the dictum ‘no Jews, no news’
While major cities across North America were grappling with pro-Palestinian “cancel Christmas” protests over the holidays, Turkey quietly executed a round of airstrikes against Kurdish targets in Iraq and northern Syria.
Turkey’s defence ministry announced on Christmas day that at least 26 militants were killed in the strikes, ordered in retaliation for the deaths of 12 Turkish soldiers in Iraq days earlier. At least eight civilian casualties, including two women, were reported in northern Syria; a dozen more were reported injured.
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Turkey, a NATO ally of Canada, has ramped up hostilities against Kurdish groups in recent months, carrying out 128 strikes in northeast Syria alone in 2023. Nearly 100 casualties, including at least five children, have been reported in connection with the Turkish campaign. A number of these attacks have involved drones.
The Turkish barrage has continued into the new year, with aerial attacks targeting energy and civilian infrastructure reported two weeks ago.
The Kurds, considered to be the world’s largest stateless nation, ought to be a cause célèbre for a global activist class that’s been swept up, over the past three months, by a fervour to support the nearby Palestinians. Numbering upwards of 25 million and spread across four Middle Eastern countries, the Kurds boast their own language and a distinct cultural identity dating back to at least the Middle Ages. (By contrast, the very notion of Palestinian national identity is still debated; the PLO itself called Palestinians “part of the Arab nation” in its 1968 charter.)
The post-First World War Treaty of Sèvres (1920) envisioned an independent Kurdistan in the former Ottoman Empire but that state never materialized. The Kurds’ subsequent century-long struggle for self-determination has seen a staggering number of casualties.
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Approximately 40,000 people have perished in 40 years of off-and-on fighting between Turkey and the militant Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), the vast majority of whom have been Kurds. A further 50,000 to 180,000 Iraqi Kurd lives were claimed in the Anfal campaign, carried out in the late 1980s by the Saddam Hussein-led Baathist party. (Details of Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds came to light in criminal proceedings against the late dictator). More recently, 11,000 Kurds have died in the fight against ISIL.
Yet for all their suffering and broadly pro-Western sympathies, the Kurds have struggled to maintain global visibility. Outside of a brief fascination with all-female Kurdish militias (mostly among oversexed and overly online men), the community’s plight has stirred few emotions here in the West. Ask your average Canadian what a “Kurd” is, and their response will likely include the words “french fries” and “gravy.”
What’s especially head-scratching is the general invisibility of Rojava, the Kurdish-majority autonomous region of northern Syria that’s been called the most progressive society in the Middle East. Rojava is governed, at present, by an aspirational social contract that enshrines direct democracy, women’s rights, ethnic pluralism and ecological justice.
“The social revolution that was achieved under the leadership of women in North and East Syria opened the way for an intellectual and social renaissance,” reads the social contract’s preamble.
“The Democratic Autonomous Administration, which was achieved by the will of the people, is based upon an ecological democratic society, co-chairing, communal economy, social justice, and the principle of democratic confederalism.”
In practice, Rojava is administered under a co-chair system wherein major civilian and military institutions are headed jointly by a man and a woman. Introduced by the Kurdish-controlled Democratic Union Party (PYD) in 2012, the system has since undergirded an unprecedented level of female participation in all facets of society.
But Rojava’s radical experiment with egalitarian democracy hangs in the balance amidst Turkish aggression. Recent Turkish drone strikes have targeted critical infrastructure, cutting off power to hospitals and exacerbating an already severe regional water crisis. Hundreds of thousands in the region have been affected by the disruptions, which show no signs of abating.
“Rojava” is a name that should be on the lips of every celebrity activist in the West, much like “Tibet” was 30 years ago. Yet the Turkish onslaught in Rojava has generated little media coverage beyond the occasional New York Times op-ed.
Puzzlingly, the global do-gooder brigade has instead thrown its weight behind Hamas-controlled Gaza, a place where, per the terrorist group’s 1988 charter, the primary role of women in society is to “manufacture men.” The same people have shrugged off (and, in some cases, outright denied) the organized sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Thomas Juneau, a professor specializing in Middle Eastern security at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, says the Kurds are one of a number of oppressed groups in the region who have seen their respective causes overshadowed by the war in Gaza.
“The Palestinian issue tends to draw a lot of global attention whenever these sorts of crises flare up,” Juneau said in an interview. “Whether that’s good or bad for the Palestinian cause is a subject for fair debate.”
Juneau added that mainstream Kurdish groups may be hesitant to capitalize on the pro-Palestinian movement out of fear of alienating Western benefactors, whom they still rely upon for military equipment and other forms of aid.
“Kurdish leaders are quite mindful of how their words and actions are received in places like Washington, D.C.”
The world’s general indifference to Rojava, an oasis of progressive values in one of the globe’s most war-torn areas, is nevertheless peculiar. One has to wonder what the situation might look like if it were Israel, and not Turkey, launching the drones that are taking out Rojava’s water towers and power grids.
But when it comes to the affairs of the region, a reliable rule-of-thumb is “no Jews, no news.”
National Post
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