Kurdish "Popular Protection Units" Defence
"We can provide for ourselves from our land, even under siege. We can sacrifice."
"We're ready. We won't attack anyone, but if attacked, we can and will defend ourselves."
Nuri, ex-PKK fighter, advisor to the Kurdish administration, Syria
"They cut hands, cut heads, play with corpses."
"Many of them are on drugs. They attack randomly, haphazardly. But they can't progress into our areas."
Female Kurdish fighter
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| A Kurdish fighter from the Popular Protection Units (YPG) holds his weapon as he takes position atop a building with a YPG flag in Aleppo's Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood, June 7, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman) |
Syria's Kurds sought the opportunity to separate themselves and remain outside the conflict that is tearing Syria apart. They refused to make common cause with the Syrian rebels, and wanted no part in the regime's battle with the rebels.They declared independence from Damascus where they live in areas along the border with Turkey, controlling three separate enclaves in the northeast. Like their counterparts in Iraq, these enclaves represent the more peaceful, well-governed areas of the country.
About 80,000 people live under the Kurdish administration dominated by the Democratic Union Party in its largest enclave, Kobani. The party is allied closely with the separatist Kurdish movement, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey. After many years of conflict between the PKK and the government of Turkey, the presence of a militantly capable group of Kurds in Syria so close to the PKK which the government of President Erdogan has recently called a truce with, makes Turkey nervous.
It is the Kurds' misfortune that they represent the single largest ethnic group in the world without a geography of their own. They live in areas of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, none of which countries are interested in ceding to them those parts of the geography which they dominate; an inheritance from colonialist days when imperialistic power created haphazard boundary lines in creating new 'countries' comprising areas embracing groups traditionally antagonistic toward one another.
In Kobani the Kurds are threatened by the al-Qaeda-aligned ISIS, the most brutal extremist jihadi political-military-religious organization devoted to installing Sharia law and rousting Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Jihadists are attempting to starve out the Kurds, hitting them with a daily barrage of mortar fire and sniper activity.
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| Fighters of the Popular Protection Units (YPG). File photo: YPG Media Center |
ISIS has cut Kobani's electricity, leaving power available only part of the day and through generators. Water access has been cut off as well, though the digging of new wells has solved part of that problem in the enclave. Kurdish smugglers do a brisk trade bringing people and supplies into Kobani under cover of night. Food must be smuggled in leaving the residents to eat canned fish, tomatoes and vegetables grown in their own gardens.
At the Ayn Al Arab hospital, one of two hospital facilities in Kobani, medical supplies have become scarce, with few incubators for newborns and no dialysis machines for those with kidney disease. "We're short of equipment here, and short of drugs. But we improvise, and we innovate, and we don't die", said one doctor.
They're on their own; Turkey is disinterested in their plight, their neighbours cannot help, under duress themselves; they've refused alliances with the rebels and the regime, and even Doctors Without Borders is loathe to commit to aiding them fearful of alienating Turkish authorities.Yet the education system is functioning and its police force is present and maintaining order, and optimism, that vital ingredient for survival, is never absent.
They have managed to repel attacks from ISIS small-arms fire, firing back every time they are fired upon, whereupon daily life resumes. The jihadis have themselves suffered heavy casualties as their ground assaults fail. Leaving them to occasionally fire mortar and small arms at the Kobani fighters who have utter contempt for ISIS. "They are monsters", said one Kurd fighter of the Chechens who represent a large proportion of the jihadis.
While the Kurds operate the most peaceful part of Syria, ISIS torments those living under their thrall, and presides over a brutal Islamist emirate. Syria no longer consists of a single state. Within it wars exist within wars and states within states.
Labels: Al-Qaeda, Conflict, Islamism, Persecution, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Monday, May 12, 2014
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