Kurdistan forces are liberating Western Kurdistan

[alan131210]

Kak Taslor , dont you think time has come to rename the thread

[brendar]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYzDZhhAyxc&feature=share&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&hd=1   

[brendar]

[Kurdistano]

I saw on the news that the free syrian army has taken control over the border city to akcakale bordering Urfa. Shouldnt the Kurds being under control of this area I mean it is pred Kurdish/Arab and we need it as a link to Efrin.

[talsor]

Kak Taslor , dont you think time has come to rename the thread

I was thinking the same , but I think the big battle is coming sooner or later . The only appropriate title for now seems to be " Western kurdistan ....not too sure what is going on "

[brendar]

Kak Taslor , dont you think time has come to rename the thread

I was thinking the same , but I think the big battle is coming sooner or later . The only appropriate title for now seems to be " Western kurdistan ....not too sure what is going on "

Currently, the Kurdish politicians are completely silent which is very strange. There are only few protests in the Kurdish areas. I also don't understand the situation at the moment because there are just few or no news at the moment.

[brendar]

The Role of Iraqi Kurdistan in the Syrian-Kurd Pursuit of Autonomy

PDF: http://studies.aljazeera.net/ResourceGa ... tonomy.pdf

[brendar]

[brendar]

ERBIL, Sept.21 (AKnews)- Mahmoud Wali Babijani, a leader of Kurdistan Freedom Party of Syria was assassinated last night in Raas al-Ain, Hasaka province, Kurdish Xendan news agency reported today.

The agency cited Dr. Kawa Azizi, a Kurdistan Region based member of the Kurdish National Council of Syria, saying two unidentified gunmen in masks killed Babijani and fled away.

Azizi added Babijani was kidnapped nine months ago and was released after he was tortured severely for a long time.

The related parties will begin investigating the event tomorrow, according to Azizi.

http://www.aknews.com/en/aknews/3/327276/

[alan131210]

Kurdish leaders of Syria urge parties to implement Erbil agreement



ERBIL, Sept.22 (AKnews)- Two Kurdish leaders of Syria demand the Kurdish parties to set aside their differences and implement Erbil agreement in the interest of Kurds.

The agreement was signed under the supervision of Kurdistan Region's President Massoud Barzani and united the two major Kurdish fronts in Syria, the People's Council of Western Kurdistan and the Kurdish National Council of Syria.

Shalal Gado, a politburo member of the Kurdish Leftist Party of Syria, said so far Erbil agreement has not been implemented.

Gado continued "enforcement of the agreement will guarantee the rights of Kurds but since it has not been implemented yet, especially in terms of security and services, there will be threats against Kurds in Syria."

He urged the signatories of Erbil agreement to activate the committees the agreement calls for and end suspending the agreement.

Ali Shamdin, a member of the Kurdish National Council of Syria, linked suspending the enforcement of the agreement to the disputes of the political parties.

"This is while Kurds in Syria have no other option but to enforce the agreement…. or else the situation of Kurds in Syria will deteriorate and there will be the possibility of civil war among the parties," Shamdin said.

[alan131210]

Barzani calls Italy and the world countries to provide assistance for 24 thousand Syrian refugees in Kurdistan



Shafaq News / Kurdistan Region President , Massoud Barzani demanded on Saturday, the Italian government and the rest of the world countries to provide assistance to improve the conditions of about 24 thousand Syrian refugees in Kurdistan Region.

The Italian Foreign Minister, Giulio Teresa received on Friday, at the headquarters of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome, the President of the Kurdistan region, Massoud Barzani and his accompanying delegation.

The Italian Foreign Minister said in a statement issued by the presidency of the province in which "Shafaq News" received a copy of it in a joint meeting with Barzani and his accompanying delegation that “his country has managed through the Italian consulate in Erbil to strengthen those relations and that the Italian companies have participated well in building the region and we will try to raise also the prospects of scientific cooperation with the region.”

Teresa stressed "the importance of straightening ties with Kurdistan as they are interested in this region in terms of political and economic stability."

The Italian minister expressed displeasure and regret about the situation in Syria, stressing the important role of Kurdish people in Syria.

"It is important to make a change in Syria in a condition of ensuring the role and rights of all the components in this country."

For his part, the President of Kurdistan region expressed his support for the Italian initiative, by saying that" we will support in all our efforts to deepen these relations for political and economic and social development stability in Kurdistan Region."

Barzani said that "there are approximately 24 thousand Syrian citizens have resorted to Kurdistan and they have been given humanitarian aid by Kurdistan Regional Government in collaboration with the refugee agency of the United Nations," calling "Italy and other countries to provide assistance to improve the conditions of these refugees."

Kurdistan Region President had left Erbil last week at the head of a delegation comprising of the President of the Office of the Presidency of Kurdistan Region, Fouad Hussein, the Chairman of the External Relations Department in the Region’s Government, Falah Mustafa, heading towards Europe according to official invitations from partisan and government parties to attend the international conferences and meetings, According to a presidential statement

[alan131210]

ERBIL, September 23 (AKnews) – The number of Syrian kurds in Domiz camp, in south Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province, has reached 30,000, said the Displacement and Migration Director in the province.

The number means an increase of 114 percent in about a month’s time from 14,000 according to statistics released on August 26.

Most of the Syrian refugees are Kurds among them Syrian army defectors.

Mohammed Abdullah Hamo stated "The refugees are free whether to stay in the camp or leave to their families and relatives in the region. But registering refugees in the camp is a must."

Hamo expected the number of refugees in the camp to increase further. Also indicated that the Hollywood star and UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie's visit to the camp made the United Nation to pay more attention to the situation of the refugees.

Hamo said earlier "Our staff at Camp Domiz are working day and night to reduce the suffering of the Syrian refugees, and we are working in collaboration with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to accommodate new refugees."

Jolie visited the Kurdistan Region's Syrian refugee camps on August 16.

According to figures, the Syrian crisis over the last 18 months has forced some 235,000 Syrians to flee to neighboring countries, with 80,000 taking shelter in Turkey and 25,000 were killed in clashes and shellings.

[brendar]

Like the Syrian refugees in Turkey, whom I wrote about in April, those in Iraqi Kurdistan have fled a violent war. Often, they have left behind family or friends; certainly they have left behind possessions, which they imagine now lying vulnerable, in the path of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless army. They hate Assad. Refugee camps in both Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey expand depending on specific battles, so that whole blocks of newly erected tents might hold fragments of particular Syrian neighborhoods, or entire families. But unlike in Turkey, where Syrian refugees are wary of the host government even as they remain grateful to it, the refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Domiz camp feel they have left their home, but not their homeland. This simple distinction—what, exactly, Syria’s Kurds want to fight for—goes a long way toward explaining the role of Kurds in Syria.

There are other similarities between the camps in Turkey and the camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. They look alike. Rows of tents are surrounded by metal fences; hand-dug ravines catch runoff from large water containers propped up on concrete bricks between the tents. A heavy canopy of shock and exhaustion hangs over everything. Women cook, children find spaces to play, men cough outside the makeshift clinic. Those who can leave the camp to find work in nearby cities, and men of fighting age will leave for military training. In Turkey, Syrian men join the ranks of the rebel Free Syrian Army with support of the Turkish government, which has come out as one of Assad’s primary detractors and, because of geography, also a guardian of the opposition to his rule. In Iraqi Kurdistan, male refugees are likewise being separated and trained to fight; not for Syria, their home, but for Kurdistan, their homeland.

In Domiz, which I visited in early September for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a young woman had just given birth in a local hospital. In a small concrete room, which the family built themselves, she sat next to the sleeping infant. She felt lucky for the room, which was palatial compared to the surrounding tents, and for the family money that paid for it. But she hated the camp. She pointed to her asthmatic brother who, because of the air—sandy, heavy, hot—must be hooked up to an oxygen tank for a few hours every day. The camp is dirty and crowded, and all the discomforts only exacerbated the anguish she felt about being there. But amid all that was a strange feeling of liberation. “Compared to Turkish camps, this is better,” she said. “At least you are living under a Kurdish government, not a Turkish, Syrian, or Persian one.” A young man sitting near the doorway chimed in: “Barzani is our President.”
Barzani is Massoud Barzani, the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, the autonomous region in Northern Iraq governed by the Kurdish Regional Government (K.R.G.). While the Kurds in Syria focus their energies on protecting the Kurdish northeast and pressuring the Syrian opposition to guarantee them constitutional rights in any new government, the Kurds of Iraq have stressed unity—but among Kurds, not Syrians. It’s a policy that explains the young mother’s trust in the K.R.G. to protect her and her new daughter, and the young man’s loyalty to Barzani. And it’s a policy that might inspire that young man who left Syria to avoid being drafted into the Syrian Army to fight anyway, but for Kurdistan, not Syria.

When I visited Domiz, the big news was not Angelina Jolie’s then-upcoming visit, but a nearby camp where these defectors, and other potential soldiers, were being trained by K.R.G. Special Forces. After Assad falls, these soldiers would return to Syria to protect the Kurdish region. It was a display of muscle, and also of Kurdish solidarity—overseeing the camp was a union of Syrian Kurdish parties that had previously been rivals. In a post-Assad Syria, Kurds would focus on fighting the authorities, not each other.

Barzani confirmed the existence of the camp in late July, but that announcement only raised more questions. Were Kurds on both sides of the border not just anticipating but helping to guarantee a divided Syria? What role would the P.Y.D. (the Syrian affiliate of the P.K.K., a group that has been fighting the Turkish government for decades) play, particularly with Turkey fretting that northeast Syria was becoming a P.K.K. territory? How genuine was the alliance, made official not long ago in Erbil, between the Syrian Kurdish parties?

Abdul Hakim Bashar, the head of the Kurdish National Council (K.N.C.), a Syrian political organization that until recently was in opposition to the P.Y.D., who has expressed his dislike for armed resistance in the past, explained the purpose of this training camp when we met in his Erbil office. The Free Syrian Army, he said, has “played a very honorable role in fighting the Assad regime.” But fighting the Assad regime is not the top priority of Syria’s Kurds. Without the guarantee of rights under a new government, they will continue to defend only their own region. The military training camp is preparation for that. “We train them to protect Kurdish territories because they are very rich in oil,” Bashar told me. “It’s for security, not for fighting.”

Bashar told me that there is no P.Y.D. presence in the military camp. “Maybe some of the members are P.Y.D., but they’re not telling anyone,” he said. Salih Muslim Muhammed, the head of the P.Y.D., confirmed, between meetings with Kurdish opposition in Erbil, that there is officially no one from his party being trained in the military camps. But that doesn’t mean that the P.Y.D. and the K.N.C. aren’t working toward the same goals in Syria. The P.Y.D. is busy defending Kurdish Syria now, Muhammed said, but they are waiting for K.N.C. soldiers to join them. After Assad falls, the parties would share power. All is well with Kurdish unity.

The use of military force as resistance is, to put it mildly, a sensitive issue among Kurds. Even those who agree with the demands of the P.K.K. acknowledge that the decades of war between the P.K.K. and the Turkish Army has increased the challenges for Kurds trying to participate in political and civic life, even while it has raised awareness of the Kurdish struggle. P.K.K. presence in northern Iraq’s Qandil mountains has tested the K.R.G.’s loyalty to Kurdish resistance and its friendship with Turkey, which seems to be only getting stronger. When I spoke to officials in the K.R.G. about the military camp, there was cautious equivocating over the use of military force in Syria. Karim Sinjari, the K.R.G.’s Minister of Interior, insisted the establishing of the camp was a “human rights issue,” not a military one. “It’s a civilian camp for educational purposes only,” he told me, distancing the K.R.G. from the armed strategies of the P.Y.D. and P.K.K. But he continued, “It’s not necessary to give them weapons training. Every Kurd already knows how to use weapons.”

The freedom felt by that young mother, who, in the same breath, lamented the hardships in Domiz and celebrated her new Kurdistan address, is a complicated notion shared by most Kurds. Iraqi Kurdistan is, to many of them, the first step toward a united homeland, and what’s happening in Syria is foremost part of that specific, Kurdish narrative. Kurds in Syria are accustomed to being oppressed and isolated in their own country. Perhaps it is not that the refugees in Domiz feel at home because they remain in Kurdistan; perhaps they are just used to feeling like refugees.

I met Amin, one of the soldiers being trained, on that September day in the Domiz camp. A twenty-year-old who’d defected from Syria six months before, Amin chose the military camp over Domiz because it offered him the chance to take an active role in the fighting without joining the Free Syrian Army. Plus, the military camp is nicer than Domiz. There, instead of tents, they all have concrete homes. Unlike in Syria, the soldiers get paid, and even have vacation days, which they can use to visit family in Domiz or in nearby Dohuk. Amin was on one of these short breaks and he walked proudly through the lines of Domiz’s tents in his uniform, proof to the struggling refugees that Kurds were taking a stand. “We are determined to fight for our country,” Amin told me. “Kurdistan.”


http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/n ... istan.html

[brendar]

Muslim what? Muslim Hollywood? or Muslim SisterHood? or Muslim Lollyhood? nah, its actully called Muslim wastehood

I mean......can those muslims just leave us ALONE. WE DONT WANT YOU, NOR YOUR RELIGION. WHY CANT THEY UNDERSTAND.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s secretary general, Mohammed Riad al-Shaqfa, emphasized his party’s rejection of a Kurdish entity being established in Syria.

In an interview with the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, Shaqfa revealed the Muslim Brotherhood’s worries regarding developments in the Kurdish areas of Syria, and stated that there is no such a thing as a “Kurdish region” in the country.

“There is no one single purely Kurdish area in Syria and the Kurds are a minority in northeastern areas since they live with other components of Syrian society there,” Shaqfa told Cumhuriyet.

He added, “We clearly oppose the ambitions of establishing a Kurdish entity in Syria.”

Most research estimates Syrian Kurds make up between 12 and 15 percent of the population in Syria. However, Shaqfa claims, “The Kurds in Syria do not constitute more than 5 percent.”

Shaqfa’s statements angered many Syrian Kurdish activists and politicians, and caused controversy between the different revolutionary forces in Syria.

Massoud Akko, a prominent Syrian Kurdish activist and member of the Syrian Journalists Association (SJA), told Rudaw on Thursday that the statements by the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood went too far.

“This is not the first time for Riad al-Shaqfa to issue such flawed statements about the Kurds,” Akko said. “Neither Shaqfa and his group nor any other opposition party know the precise percentage of Kurdish people in Syria.”

He added, “The Kurdish population … should be based on the results of research, not by issuing baseless statements in this regard, because there was never a neutral or official census concerning the Syrian Kurds.”

“My advice to Mr. Riad al-Shaqfa and his entire group is to read more about the Kurds before issuing any statement; otherwise, it would be better for them to shut up,” Akko concluded.

According to Akko, such hostile statements by opposition leaders against the Kurds reinforce the divisions in Syria.

“Shaqfa and his group reveal their hostility to the Kurdish people, and that doesn’t serve the revolution and its goals. I think that such a position represents a serious danger to the future of the Kurdish people and their issue in Syria, in the case that the Muslim Brotherhood rules the country someday,” Akko said.

He continued, “They should review these shameful statements and attitudes which basically spread a spirit of hatred between them and the Kurdish people.”

Regarding the establishment of a Kurdish entity in Syria, Akko stated, “That is one of the legitimate rights for Kurds in Syria according to all the international conventions and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. The Kurds are a nation and it is their legitimate and unquestionable right to be an independent entity and enjoy their sovereignty on their own land.”

However, Akko noted that none of the Kurdish factions have demanded that an independent Kurdish entity be established in Syria, and that their ultimate demand is for a decentralized federal state as is found in Germany, Switzerland, the U.S and the U.A.E.

An alternative demand is the right to a self-governed Kurdish region where the Kurds can enjoy an autonomous administrative rule, a right they have been deprived of for decades under different Syrian governments.

Akko argued that a Kurdish state is a right, and any denial of this by any party or opposition faction is unacceptable and should be condemned by all Kurds.

“The main question remains whether it can be implemented, because this issue is relevant to the geopolitical circumstances in the region,” Akko said, also noting the importance of international support towards reaching this Kurdish ambition.

“Anyway, nothing is impossible,” he concluded. “Where there’s a will, there is a way.”

http://www.rudaw.net/english/news/syria/5231.html

[alan131210]

The P.Y.D. is busy defending Kurdish Syria now, Muhammed said, but they are waiting for K.N.C. soldiers to join them. After Assad falls, the parties would share power. All is well with Kurdish unity.

that is what i want to hear from PYD, but they refused this so far and only let YGP control WK, same as it was in SK with pdk vs puk, except that they both participated in liberating SK.