Is the US changing policy towards Rojava and the Kurds?

Dyarbakir

 

It has been a busy weekend – to say the least- in the Middle East.

On Saturday morning, two suicide bombers targeted a Kurdish peace march in Ankara, Turkey. The blasts killed over 100 people and injured 400. So far nobody claimed the attack, though the PM Ahmet Davutoglu claimed it could have been carried out by ISIS.   Accounts on the ground talked about riot police assaulting the crowd straight after the explosions, preventing ambulance to get to the site and helping people. Social media and the internet got shut down hours after the blasts. Curfews got in place in several cities. There has been a significant rise in social tension that reminds me of what happened in Italy during the 70’s and early  80’s, the strategy of tension a sort of counter-insurgency tactics in which the society is destabilized through violence.

A man crying on the bombing site in Ankara

In the meantime, during the weekend violence broke out again in Jerusalem and Gaza. Many fears for a Third Intifada and with the world concentrating mainly on Syria that could be a quite dangerous scenario.

This morning I woke up with another news that should not have surprised me, but somehow it did. The US has dropped about 110 pallets of ammunition and weapons to the YPG – The People Protection Unit -. We talked about them several times in this blog, as the only effective force on the ground stopping ISIS. They are also fighting for Kurdish rights, women equality and ecology.

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Journey to Qandil mountains, the PKK main base in Iraq

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Since I started reporting from Iraq and Syria, I always wanted to go to Qandil. Many Kurdish fighters told me about this 28 miles long valley which has become the PKK main headquarter in Northern Iraq. Their stories involved tunnels digged deep into the ground, camouflage training camps, a lot of politics. All of them were sure Qandil is impossible to penetrate. All tales involved a kind of a magical element.

The PKK has been labelled a terrorist organization by the Turkish government and many Western countries, including the US. The PKK picked up an armed struggle in 1984 and started a civil war against Ankara claiming for an autonomous State in which the Kurds will be free. At least 40,000 people, mainly Kurds, died during the conflict.

A lot of things has changed since, starting from the geo-political scenario and alliances on the ground.  The global changes imposed a renovation even within the organization which through the past 40 years changed mentality and somehow beliefs. The first main adjustment arrived when the PKK leader and co-founder Abdullah Ocalan, was arrested in Nairobi in 1999. I wrote about it in an article for War Is Boring.

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Women in war, some changes on the battlefield

Hello everyone,

I have not been updating the blog for a while. I am sorry about that. The good news is I have been working on several new projects, some of those I hope to show you quite soon.

First of all let me tell you what I have been producing lately. For the website War Is Boring I wrote about Maria Giulia Sergio, aka Fatima. The 27 years-old became the first known Italian woman who has joined ISIS. She left her home town, few miles from Milan, in October 2014, and fled to Syria, where now she is a proud Jihadi bride. While living in the Islamic State she tried to convince her family to join her. Her parents and sister got arrested in one of the most important anti-terrorist operation against IS in Italy. If you want to know about her story, this is the link.

In the meantime I gathered even more evidence on ISIS women fighting on the front lines.  I have been showed a picture of women killed on the battlefields around Kobane, at the height of the fight. The person who took this picture doesn’t want it to go public. They were dressed in uniform and not wearing a niqab, they tried to blend in with male jihadi. There are three bodies amongst a group of seven. Also other YPG foreign fighters claimed to have a killed women fighting with Daesh. I will keep you updated on that.

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ISIS women joining the frontline to fight

Something is changing in the Islamic State. Women travelling to Syria to join the terrorist group want to fight and they are travelling to the front lines in Iraq. This is the result of my latest reporting trip in Iraqi Kurdistan, where several military officials confirmed this new trend.

In Sinjar, one of the main front of the war against ISIS, both Peshmerga and YPJ told me about ISIS women having a very active role in the fight. I first talked to Beritan, a YJA Star brigade commander who heard a Daesh woman on the radio giving orders to men. “She was obviously a commander,” said Beritan while having a chai in her base in the outskirt of Sinjar city. Less than a hundred meters away Colonel Rafat Salim Raykoni said ISIS women are in Sinjar. “They are mainly snipers and work in logistic,” he added.

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Benedetta Argentieri

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