Meghan Bodette
@_____mjb
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Director of Research @KurdishPeaceOrg / Alum @GeorgetownSFS / Focused on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict & how to solve it. Like/RT =/= endorsement; opinions mine.
Joined January 2018
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8 years ago today, the YPJ was formally established.
Never forget that the strongest and most organized women's movement of our time crushed the most brutal misogynist terrorist organization of our time.
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Thread: films you can watch about the Kurdish women's movement that are accurate and don't reproduce nationalist and patriarchal narratives. They all show real fighters, politicians and activists.
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Back in the US today after almost a month in North and East Syria. There may be no other place on earth staring down so many challenges and threats from all sides with such steadfast resistance, determination and hope.
We cannot ignore them. Much more to share soon.
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Mike Pence is taking credit for defeating ISIS.
Let's be clear: The SDF defeated ISIS. In return, Donald Trump and Mike Pence let Turkey ethnically cleanse their families.
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Here is how Turkish police treat Habip Eksik, an elected member of the Turkish parliament, simply because he’s Kurdish and represents the pro-peace, pro-democracy, pro-Kurdish opposition HDP.
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This is how Turkish police in Diyarbakir/Amed responded to innocent Kurdish men, women and children on their way to celebrate Newroz. Imagine going out for Christmas or New Year’s with your family and getting tear gassed.
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On political, philosophical and historical education in the Kurdish movement:
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On this day ten years ago, Kurdish revolutionary Sakine Cansiz was assassinated by Turkish intelligence in Paris.
You may not know who she was, but if you've heard the slogan "jin, jiyan, azadi" or know about the Kurdish women who crushed ISIS in Syria, you have seen her legacy.
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Why does it matter that
#JinJiyanAzadi
#ژن_ژیان_ئازادی #زن_زندگی_آزادی has become the slogan of mass protests against misogynist authoritarianism after the murder of a Kurdish woman in Iran?
Because the movement this phrase comes from has theory + practice that go with it.
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A documentary about YPJ commander Jiyan Tolhildan, assassinated by the Erdogan regime this week. ISIS was defeated and North and East Syria’s revolution was built by people like her who overcame near-insurmountable odds to demand freedom. RIP Jiyan.
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Today is
#WorldKobaneDay
. I’m honored to have spent time in this beautiful and resilient city and met so many of its courageous people.
When we commemorate what the people of Kobane did for the world, we also need to remember what we owe them.
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Is she going to include the parts about how her State Department armed and trained the jihadist groups that terrorize these women and their communities, or her husband’s support for Turkey’s atrocities against Kurds in the 1990s?
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Is that so?
“No country should use force, or the threat of force, to redraw borders,” says
@jensstoltenberg
. The NATO chief offers solutions
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This is because one part of the population gets to study in their first language, and the other part gets insulted and beaten by their teachers if they accidentally use a word in their first language. But yeah, Soner, cool map, very fun.
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A very famous revolutionary song at the HDP’s Istanbul congress. Everyone in this video knows they could go to prison or worse for being there. They’re completely unafraid either way. Chills.
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This is ghastly. The
@NewYorker
published a glowing profile of an arms manufacturer and refused to even give a single quote to the families of the innocent Syrians and Iraqis murdered in Turkish drone strikes. Would they do this for a military company in any other country?
In the defense of Ukraine, the drone designer Selçuk Bayraktar has become a legend. He is the namesake of a baby lemur at the Kyiv zoo, and the subject of a catchy folk song, which claims that his drone “makes ghosts out of Russian bandits.”
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NEW: Calls for the PKK to declare a ceasefire had been conveyed to the group by some interested parties through Syrian Kurdish authorities,
@MazloumAbdi
told me.
Only for
@KurdishPeaceOrg
:
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NATO values: Turkey bombed a mosque and murdered a Syrian child today. Zero response from the international community, as usual.
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On this day in 2014, YPJ fighter Arin Mirkan sacrificed her own life to stop an ISIS advance and save her comrades during the battle for Kobane—the city that marked the beginning of the end for ISIS. No human being who values freedom should ever forget her.
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If peaceful Turkish, European or American cities were being bombed day and night the way peaceful Syrian Kurdish cities are being bombed right now, would anyone dare to argue that the state doing the bombing had 'legitimate security interests'? Where is the moral consistency?
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Turkey wants a US green light to invade Kobane. They have not been able to obtain it via threats yet. They are now trying to exploit yesterday's tragedy to pressure the US into allowing an invasion by baselessly insinuating US involvement and arguing that words aren't enough.
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Nine years ago today the Women's Defense Units (
#YPJ
) was formally established in Rojava/North and East Syria.
These women not only helped crush ISIS but have also transformed the status of women in their society—and they're nowhere near done with their work. Pîroz be!
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We need to have a serious conversation about the Turkish occupation of northern Syria. The West backed it and "experts" have spent four years dismissing it, but it's led to forced demographic change and documented war crimes and provided safe haven for two leaders of ISIS.
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You've likely seen these iconic images of women celebrating the liberation of
#Manbij
, four years ago today.
What you may not know is how women in the diverse city have become leaders in their communities since then— in ways that would have been unimaginable under ISIS.
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This is a very important call. It’s worth noting that Kurdish and Turkish dissidents and progressive critics of NATO got this right: Erdogan was serious about his most anti-democratic demands, and Western governments acceded to them as per usual.
In its bid to join NATO, Sweden has begun deporting Kurdish asylum-seekers to Turkey, where they face imprisonment and torture. Add your name and call on Sweden to stop the deportations now!
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With no evidence beyond the government’s quickly prepared narrative—one very convenient for pre-election goals like attacking NES or banning HDP—and reporting bans and internet shutdowns instituted to keep things that way, this is simply not credible. Heavy skepticism warranted.
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@vera_mironov
Name the individuals who are there, their ranks and positions, who gave the order, and explain how they got out of the mountains of Kurdistan, onto a commercial airline, and into Ukraine to fight for a state they see as imperialist. Or are you just making things up for clicks?
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On this day 37 years ago, the Kurdish freedom movement began its armed resistance against the Turkish state's denial and repression of Kurdish identity.
If Kurds in Turkey today can now say that they exist, if ISIS is in the dustbin of history, it is the legacy of that struggle.
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You can always count on Turkey to escalate violence at home and abroad when a major international crisis hits and attention is elsewhere.
Here's what the Erdogan regime has done to Kurdish political opposition so far this month, while he thinks no one is looking.
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3 women from the YPJ, including the Co-Chair of the Kobane Defense Committee, were assassinated in a Turkish drone strike yesterday.
More aggression against AANES and SDF leaders who aren't fighting Turkey, but simply trying to govern and defend their people.
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Turkey illegally bombed Kobane today, injuring 11 Syrian civilians, including a child whose leg was amputated, and killing one.
Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to Turkey is, literally, sitting around eating kebabs:
Ambassador-designate Flake and his wife Cheryl delight in eating kebabs in
#Ankara
.
Flakes: “Çok lezzetli ve harika 👍👍👍”
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Here is the only thing you need to know about the Turkey-PKK conflict:
If the Turkish army stopped fighting tomorrow, there'd be peace.
If the PKK stopped fighting tomorrow, Turkey would go back to denying the existence of Kurdish identity and trying to eliminate it by force.
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Think about this for a minute. A Yezidi genocide survivor can’t live freely in Europe because there are so many ISIS supporters there that her life would be in danger if she were to speak up about what she suffered.
6/ The name of the Yazidi woman can't be published. She keeps very much low profile in Germany. She was also protected by two policemen as many ISIS supporters live freely in Germany and pose a threat to her.
@akhbar
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One of the most iconic images of the Syrian conflict: the flags of the YPJ and YJŞ over liberated Raqqa, three years ago this week.
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Here's an in-depth report from the 1990s on how the Clinton Administration helped Turkey displace millions of Kurdish civilians and raze thousands of villages.
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When the SDF declared victory in Raqqa, the YPJ said: "We dedicate the liberation of Raqqa to all the women of the world."
Since then, women have led the political and social struggle to move past the repression and terror imposed by ISIS and bring their city back to life.
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The YPJ declares its solidarity with women in Rojhelat and Iran: “It is always the women who are targeted by the Iranian system, because it is the women who can achieve freedom and liberate society from the dictators.”
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Turkey in one video: armed riot police surround a small group of Kurdish women singing and dancing at an International Women’s Day celebration in Cizre.
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Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, Iraqis: Turkey has expansionist intentions
DC “experts:” that’s over-emotional exaggeration, please be realistic
The official Directorate of Communications account posting direct quotes from the president of Turkey:
President
@RTErdogan
:
"No one can limit the horizon of Türkiye to 780,000 square kilometers."
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Turkish nationalists literally dancing with flags in front of the Turkish ambassador’s residence. They’re not just genocide deniers, they celebrate what the regimes they support did and continue to do.
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Turkey's ambassador to Iraq just tacitly owned up to the fact that, in the name of fighting the PKK, Turkey is assassinating non-combatant politicians and activists beyond its borders.
That didn't get much attention—but it should have. Here's why.
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Here's a member of the Turkish parliament saying another member of the Turkish parliament should be assassinated. In a country where journalists, activists, and dissidents are killed by the state, this is a serious threat.
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These extremely brave protestors are using a translation of the Kurdish women’s protest chant that became famous worldwide during the fight against ISIS, as it was used by YPJ and the YJA-STAR and by civilian women’s movements in NES:
Students in Teheran chanting a translation of the Kurdish slogan:
Jin — Jiyan — Azadî,
Zan — Zendagi — Azadi,
Women — Life — Freedom.
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My God. The same Kurdish family that was attacked by nationalists in Konya recently was just targeted again, by the same group of people that had threatened them before. Six people were killed. This is Erdogan's Turkey.
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If Erdogan said today the Earth was flat, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the U.S. Department of State would all repeat it.
If a Kurdish politician said the Earth was round, they’d all have to fact check, then claim the shape of the planet was really up for debate.
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A Turkish court has decided that the Kurdish words for "society," "life," and "equality," among others, are "not used by the local people" and "not the Kurmanci dialect used in our country" but are instead words "adopted by the PKK."
You couldn't make this up.
DİAYDER iddianamesi 1920'lerden kalma, arkaik birtakım "tezlerin" yargısal evraklara tekrar işlenmesi açısından çarpıcı: iddianameye göre 'barış, onur, eşitlik, din, tarih, ekonomi, toplum' gibi kelimeler Kürtçede yok. Bu kelimeleri "yöre halkı" bilmiyor.
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In 1994, the Turkish Air Force bombed the villages of Kuskonar and Kocagili in Sirnak using US-origin F-16 and F-4 fighter jets, killing more than 30 civilians. They covered up the massacre and tried to blame it on the PKK.
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There still isn't a single piece of evidence linking the Istanbul attack to the AANES/SDF.
There are millions of innocent people living in NES, who have survived regime repression, ISIS, two Turkish ground attacks and an ongoing drone war.
Now they will suffer more.
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I can't stop thinking about these images. Kurds murdered by the Turkish state commemorating Kurds murdered by the Turkish state. In Turkey, Syria, Europe, it keeps happening. How many more? What can a regime be allowed to get away with?
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For
@ROAR_Magazine
I wrote about Turkish attacks on post-genocide Sinjar, the threat they pose to Yezidis, how both regional actors and global powers support this aggression—and why global solidarity with local demands for autonomy is the answer.
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One of the YPJ fighters Arin Mirkan was covering for when she sacrificed herself during the battle for Kobane was none other than Rojda Felat— who went on from that day on Mishtenur Hill to command all SDF forces in the liberation of Raqqa.
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Arin Mirkan saved lives. She used her immensely courageous last moments to take out several genocidal slave-owning ISIS monsters and give the women under her command a chance to escape and live to fight another day. If you don’t like ISIS, you owe her a debt of gratitude.
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Another Turkish strike in Sinjar, the second in two days. Reportedly it hit a village hospital in Sikeniye and people are injured.
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As someone who has worked intensively to raise awareness of just one aspect of the many atrocities taking place in Turkish-occupied Efrîn—the rampant, systemic violence and discrimination against women—I'm horrified that this article would be published as written.
Turkey’s intervention in Syria was widely criticized three years ago. But today, Turkish forces are all that stand between five million vulnerable citizens and potential slaughter at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his Russian allies.
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Here's a map of the 2018 Turkish parliamentary election results looking at votes cast from prisons only (in Turkey, people retain their right and ability to vote while in prison).
Purple is HDP. That gives you an idea of who is jailed in Turkey.
24 Haziran 2018 genel seçimlerinde cezaevlerindeki seçim sonuçlar��
🟣 Mor: HDP
🟢 Yeşil: MHP
🔵 Mavi: İYİ Parti
🔴 Kırmızı: CHP
*AK Parti'nin 1. çıktığı il bulunmamakta.
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I wrote this, about Turkey's attacks on Yezidi genocide survivors, in 2021.
I could have written it today, or after any of the other eight reported Turkish drone strikes in Sinjar this year.
It is a massive international shame that it remains relevant.
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One of many flaws in this article is that, in claiming that no one in Turkey would ever support genocide recognition, it ignores that there's an entire party that does and elected officials who've submitted bills that would do so—at great personal risk!
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I have no words. One of Turkey's demands for Sweden's NATO accession is reportedly the ***extradition*** of ***democratically elected Swedish MP*** Amineh Kakabaveh, who is of Iranian Kurdish descent and came to Sweden as a refugee.
JUST NU: Turkiets Sverigeambassadör vill att riksdagsledamoten Amineh Kakabaveh utlämnas till Turkiet, skriver TT
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Amed Newroz 2022. For everyone who argued that the Kurdish people and their political movement were irrelevant or on the way out, here’s your answer. Newroza we hemuyan pîroz be! 🔥✌🏻💛❤️💚
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This is Cizre. The Erdogan regime flattened this city because Kurds there didn’t vote for him. Today the people come out to celebrate Newroz despite police attacks.
You can ban a party. You can’t ban a people, and you can’t ban an idea.
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Journalists and analysts: The YBS is not “PKK linked” or “PKK affiliated.” Don’t use this phrasing. It’s an armed force made up of Iraqi Yezidi genocide survivors that has made serious attempts to integrate into Iraqi structures and has nothing to do with PKK’s fight against TR.
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By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
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ISIS attacks; international community commends the SDF for making innumerable sacrifices to stop them; Turkey immediately bombs communities who survived and fought ISIS; international community says nothing and continues to make deals with Turkey. The same story since 2015.
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Syria’s “moderate rebels” take a moment to remind the world that the takeover of an entire country by medieval fundamentalist thugs is also their goal.
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False. The SDF have killed zero people in Turkey because they do not operate in Turkey. “Tens of thousands” is all deaths in the Turkey-PKK conflict since its beginning, including armed combatants on both sides. Most victims of the conflict were civilians killed by the state.
SDF/PKK is a radical Marxist group that is responsible for killing tens of thousands of people in Turkey. Our support for SDF/PKK is partially responsible for poisonous relations with Turkey. Yet there was no one else, so the U.S. jumped in bed with one FTO to fight another FTO.
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NATO weapons are being captured off of Turkish-backed jihadists, at the same time as Turkey is bombing the SDF and the YBS, at the same time as ISIS is trying to reconstitute itself. Everyone needs to be clear about the alliances here.
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1. Yesterday, Turkey made an explicit threat against all public infrastructure in northeastern Syria, which it falsely claims is “YPG infrastructure.” Targeting civilians and civilian objects is a war crime, as are indiscriminate attacks.
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Wow.
@UNHCRIraq
, theoretically responsible for protecting the Kurdish refugees at Makhmour, has blocked their page on Twitter, one of the few public outlets they have to call attention to abuses.
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Unsatisfied with merely illegally imprisoning him on false charges in defiance of a binding ECtHR ruling, the Erdogan regime is now going after Selahattin Demirtaş’ family—throwing his wife in jail over a typo. A new level of dictatorship. Everyone should be talking about this.
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I wrote this three years arguing that the continued terrorist designation of the PKK is immoral, illegal, and bad for peace and democracy in Turkey, Kurdistan and the Middle East. It’s more true today than ever. Please read and share.
#DelistPKKnow
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It's so openly disingenuous how so many politicians and institutions commemorate the Yezidi Genocide every August, but when Turkey acts as ISIS' air force and bombs the survivors with impunity there's just complete silence from everyone but local people and established activists.
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Look who's discovering that the concepts of terrorism and counter-terrorism as they're used now justify violence carried out by states, even though violence carried out by states is usually on a far greater scale.
Serious question. I am not an expert. In international law, why is the Al Qaeda killing of innocents in NY and DC on September 11, 2001 considered an act of terrorism, but Putin's slaughter of innocents in Bucha, Kramatorsk, Chernihiv, or Mariupol is not terrorism?
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Mainstream voices spent the past six months calling Kurdish political activity in Europe a "security threat" and baselessly claiming it has links to "terrorism" because of Turkey and NATO.
Now a Kurdish cultural center in Europe has been attacked.
Rhetoric has consequences.
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@NewYorker
Instead of reading propaganda for a dictator's favorite arms dealer, read instead about Mizgin Ahmad, whose husband was killed in a Turkish drone strike in Syria.
Her four kids are still too young to understand why their father isn't ever coming home.
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One reason why the Turkish-Kurdish conflict has gone on so long is because foreign countries prop up right-wing authoritarian leaders in Turkey who are unable to consider non-military solutions, preventing the country from being forced to reckon with its problems on its own.
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Today marks 3 years since Turkey fully occupied Efrîn. Since then, the region's Kurdish, Yezidi, and Alevi communities have been ethnically cleansed, women have been forced out of public life, cultural sites have been destroyed, homes and agricultural land have been stolen.
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The PKK helped defeat ISIS and fights for the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people. It’s the opposite of a terrorist organization, and continuing to list it is a free gift by the US and European countries to Turkey’s endless wars across the Middle East.
#DelistPKKNow
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Thinking of my Armenian friends who have worked extremely hard for so long to make genocide recognition possible. Pressure and organizing work, even when you're up against a dictator with unlimited money and resources to spread lies.
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Anyone who tells you the latest round of illegal Turkish bombardment in Iraq is targeting the PKK is lying to you.
This is an attack on Kurdish refugees who fled the destruction of thousands of villages in the 1990s, and Yezidis who survived ISIS genocide in 2015.
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The threat of a new illegal and unprovoked Turkish invasion of North and East Syria, which would displace hundreds of thousands and obliterate the gains of the counter-ISIS campaign, is the highest it’s been since 2019, and DC is checked out for the holidays.
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You have a majority now. Would you like to do something about this?
Turkey committed human rights abuses in Syria, against the Kurds, and is enflaming the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan
I forced a vote to take action on Turkey's human rights abuses
But Republicans refused so they can keep moving forward to rip health care from millions
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Eight years ago this week, two YPJ fighters from Efrîn—Silava Efrîn and Bêrîvan Qelender—lost their lives defending their hometown from Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists.
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This, from
@vvanwilgenburg
's new book, is actually a great metaphor for how politically and practically far ahead of the entire rest of the region the organized Kurdish women of Turkey and northeast Syria are.
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Four years ago this week, Turkey took full control of Efrîn. Never forget that it was a war of territorial conquest based on lies intended to remove an ethnic group from part of their homeland—and the world allowed it.
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Wow. Winning Van Metropolitan Municipality mayoral candidate Abdullah Zeydan was given his mandate back after a night of mass protests. This is the first time Erdogan’s government has ever reversed course after seizing a municipality from the pro-Kurdish political movement.
Kürt halkının, dostlarımızın ve demokratik kamuoyunun direnişi sonucunda Van Büyükşehir Belediyesi Eş Başkanımız Abdullah Zeydan’a mazbatasının verilmesine karar verilmiştir. Her Bijî Berxwedana Gelê Kurd!
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At my first ever Kurdish protest with the first sentence of Kurdish I learned. Still think it’s a beautiful one!
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Turkey’s Interior Minister (pictured) is having people criminally investigated for calling him “bald.”
Giving a massive state security apparatus to the most insecure men in the world doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
Süleyman Soylu'ya 'kel' demek yine soruşturma konusu oldu
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Is anything being done to hold the
@nytimes
accountable for
@carlottagall
’s egregious Turkey coverage? It’s a pattern now on a wide variety of issues and her calling a genocide an “upheaval” was just the last straw.
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Can someone explain to me why a taxpayer funded American news outlet is running propaganda for a designated terrorist and his jihadist group that brutally oppresses women, non-Muslims, and literally everyone who says a critical word about them?
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The most insulting propaganda I've seen in a while. People are being bombed every day in North and East Syria and the international community won't do anything to stop it, but companies sure will go out of their way to profit off of commercialized depictions of the region!
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This Kurdish family was trying to enjoy a summer day when Turkey targeted them with an airstrike.
Turkey is not fighting terrorism and never has been. They’re illegally using foreign airspace to bomb kids.
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Well, now I've seen everything.
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Note that the “human rights” organizations that somehow made contact with ISIS prisoners who were in the midst of staging a terrorist attack have all said nothing about illegal Turkish airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that have reportedly targeted civilians.
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Yesterday, Turkey bombed NE Syria to kill Kurdish political opponents.
Today, Iran bombed Iraqi Kurdistan to kill Kurdish political opponents.
There won’t be peace in the Middle East as long as 2 major powers are autocratic w/securitized approaches to the Kurdish issue.
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If I organized all of the English-language films/books/articles about the Kurdish women's movement that I have online copies of into one consolidated resource list, would people find that helpful?
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