Tag: Kurds

On April 13 Syria will hold parliamentary election, but who is going to vote?

Homs has been completely destroyed
The city of Homs

While the civil war continues with no possible solution ahead, the Syrian government has scheduled parliamentary  election for April 13. I found it pretty surreal. Citizens are asked to choose 250 members of the People’s Council  from 15 multi-member constituencies but nearly half of those are not under the government control.

As we well know Raqqa is occupied by the Islamic State which recently partly lost control of Deir ez-Zor. Homs is completely destroyed, and in Aleppo the ongoing fight makes it almost impossible to vote. Latakia is also partly controlled by the Syrian Army. The Kurds who established an autonomous region, known as Rojava, will not hold the elections.

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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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Benedetta Argentieri

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