Medya News Audio Articles

The NGO does call on international actors such as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and states with residents still in the camp to provide more resources, training and support to the authorities in North and East Syria. But the solution to the crisis in Hol cannot be solely technical. Along with more direct aid and support, political steps must be taken to improve the situation of the region as a whole.

From an analyst’s perspective, it is not difficult to understand the threat that Erdoğan's regime perceives. Kurdish women have proven that they can successfully resist under the harshest conditions and unite women across ethnic and religious lines in the struggle for women’s freedom. In doing so, they have become a potent threat to autocrats and fundamentalists in the region.

In reality, ISIS remain a serious threat in Syria and Iraq despite their loss of territory. Moreover, Turkey’s attacks against Kurdish-led autonomous regions in northern Syria serve exactly the same ends as ISIS’ attempts to establish their caliphate. We should not draw a distinction between those who oppose ISIS, those who oppose Turkey’s autocratic Islamist project, and those who support the Kurdish movement as a whole.

It will come as no surprise to Medya News readers to learn that Turkey has seemingly blocked access to our website. Any coverage of the Kurdish struggle for rights, self-determination and democracy is likely to incur a swift and aggressive response from the Erdoğan government. But Turkey’s programme of censorship and liquidation of free expression and open criticism is not limited to the Kurdish media.

Kurds are once again feeling that they were abandoned in the face of yet another manifestation of tyranny. These young Kurds were running from front to front to counter the barbarity of ISIS, for the sake of all of humanity. Today, they fell victim to a similar barbarity. Relations among states necessitate the world be disinterested in the matter, but civilian bodies outside of state structures are also not sufficiently interested. Kurds are told to prove they are being murdered. Amed Dicle, Medya News.

"Now that the ones who do call for respect for human rights are being targeted, it has become even more urgent for international organisations and governments to dust off their morals, strengthen their spines, act in the spirit of the convention and ask Turkey some serious questions. Lives of both guerrilla fighters fighting for a just cause and lives of civilians are at stake." Fréderike Geerdink, Medya News

The shocking video released by Kurdish freedom fighters of their friends killed with chemical weapons used by the Turkish military -- in open sight -- in the mountains of south Kurdistan has been met with a deathly silence from Western “democratic” states and the international organisations that are charged with monitoring such crimes against humanity.

If the public in Turkey was well informed, if the public in Turkey would let it sink in that they have been fooled by state-produced actual fake news for decades, for even a century, would that instill fear and disturb public order? Definitely, but fear is what the state thrives on. What they are actually afraid of, is not that it instills fear, but that it breaks the fear. Just as the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini by the ‘morality police’ in Iran broke the fear of women and girls in Rojhilat (Kurdistan in Iran) and Iran, causing them to rise up against the dictatorship’s public order.

Sunday 9 October marked the third anniversary of Operation Peace Spring, Turkey’s 2019 cross-border incursion into northeast Syria. With the operation, Turkey occupied the cities of Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ayn) and Tell Abyad (Girê Spî), and caused disastrous humanitarian consequences. According to the Rojava Information Centre (RIC), the occupied territory is 130 km long and 25 km deep, and over 200,000 people were displaced due to the conflict.

"It would have great importance if an investigation concluded that that the destruction of the agricultural bank in Zirgan in the spring of 2022 was a war crime. Even if the outcome does not include a case in court, such a conclusion would be stating that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was directly responsible for war crimes. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would be left indirectly responsible. He had knowledge of the incidents, but did not intervene." Erling Folkvold