Dani
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, well, that's a big question because it's a big project. It's been going on for quite some time.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's kind of been lost in discussions and news about the Syrian civil war because it has been such a complex, multipolar, multi-ethnic conflict. And it's been going on for, what, like 13, 14 years now? Yeah. coming up to 14 years, the Kurds in the northeast had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of civil war back in 2011 for something like this.
Behind the Bastards
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Obviously, they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades and in particular since around 2000 they'd been working on this concept of democratic confederalism which is moving away from a sort of
Behind the Bastards
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what they call an old paradigm of Marxist-Leninist thought, to this system they've now quite effectively built up there, where democracy is bottom-up, it's structured around small communes and self-organising units, cooperatives.
Behind the Bastards
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There's a market economy, but it's not a capitalist economy, where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed peoples, particularly women, who are really centred in the revolutionary process and organising that. And I think because they, maybe you can't call them conflict avoided, but they haven't avoided conflict. They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the Northeast.
Behind the Bastards
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They fought against al-Nusra Front and various other jihadi groups. They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either the FSA, as they were, or the regime and the Assad regime. Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
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And so they kind of managed to carve out a sort of democratic and semi-enclave, I mean, people would describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say it's not a state, in the northeast of Syria, whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Assad regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is hard to convey or fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there or you're deeply involved with any of these communities is quite how hard that was to do. Yeah. A lot of different ethnic groups, political groups that hate each other, you know. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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The Kurds, they brought in lots of different policies like the right to be taught in your mother tongue. When they took power 2012 onwards, they were very keen not to just sort of replace everything with Kurdish, make it a Kurdish state, you know, start being the oppressor instead of the oppressed.
Behind the Bastards
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They made sure that they continued using Arabic as the majority language because it is the majority language there. The north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area. And this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Ba'ath Party and its oppressive systems for decades.
Behind the Bastards
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So it has been a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite a few different groups that exist there.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss any of this stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're coming from. I think it's something that isn't said enough or understood enough that the modern state of Turkey is an ethno-nationalist project. I don't say that as a slur, that's like a basic founding principle of the state.
Behind the Bastards
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It's a state founded on genocide and the mass forced demographic change across the whole country. And it's continued that way. And there have been reforms for sure. But that's still a founding principle. And even now, sort of speaking a non-Turkish language in the Turkish parliament is a pretty serious violation.
Behind the Bastards
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And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, the regional power status they have in the Middle East means that they have an enormous gravity. They have an enormous amount of power over Syria. A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies on come in through Turkey or rely on Turkish industry.
Behind the Bastards
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And the Turkish military is a huge supporter of the groups in the northwest, like Hayat-ı Al-Sham and the Syrian National Army. And of course, The Kurdish question within Turkey is the main reason for their antipathy towards what's been built up in northeast Syria.
Behind the Bastards
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As much as the self-determination for oppressed people as minorities is something that's an issue, the fact that it's Kurdish-led and in particular it's emancipatory for Kurdish people threatens this ethno-nationalist aspect of their state. And it... they see it as something that needs to be nipped in the bud, right?
Behind the Bastards
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And they've sort of done that with northern Iraq, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main party there. And they know they can't do the same in northeast Syria, and the military option is their best chance, their best hope. of nipping Kurdish emancipation and Kurdish self-determination in the bud and preventing it from sort of snowballing across the region.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for people to report on the Syrian civil war. It's very hard to convey like a simple coherent narrative of one side versus the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian world and Ukrainian world. Mm-hmm. Because there are so many different groups in the SNA, it's an important one.
Behind the Bastards
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And they are grouped together with this concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria. Despite the fact that they're not actually part of Hayat al-Sham, the liberation movement, as it calls itself, that have taken over Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's kind of like a loose collection of various, some of them call themselves brigades or groups.
Behind the Bastards
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It's essentially a military proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or emancipatory. They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds in northeast Syria describe them as gangs, which kind of sounds like a propaganda term.
Behind the Bastards
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But when you actually look at what they do, they really are like sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy force by Turkey because ultimately Turkey has a massive military. Their navy is quite underfunded and not particularly well staffed. The air force has suffered pretty seriously from the fallout of the The coup in 2016. But the army is massive.
Behind the Bastards
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It's relatively well funded and their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the PKK in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. And they need to they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting militarily, as you say, since the early 1980s.
Behind the Bastards
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And they can't have a Vietnam situation of a mass movement against their military occupation and against their military efforts in Syria. They can't afford financially or politically to get into a quagmire there.
Behind the Bastards
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And so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the SNA, that's their way of being able to incur pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's been very fast moving. As you say, it's only been two weeks since the battle for Aleppo started, if you can call it a battle. So the SDF, so this is like the alliance of military groups that falls under the remit of the self-administration in the northeast Syria.
Behind the Bastards
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So the YPG and the YPJ are like the most famous and largest components of this force, but there are a whole bunch of Arab and Syrian and Armenian units within the SDF. Yeah. they held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Syria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA in Turkey in 2018. That was on one side surrounded by HTS and on the other by the SNA.
Behind the Bastards
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When things really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerted campaign to capture this area known as Sheba. And because of its position and its relatively difficult terrain and difficult logistical position to resupply, They pulled back from that towards Aleppo and Manbij, which is the only major city that the SDS still held on the west of the Euphrates. And it's the area closest to Aleppo.
Behind the Bastards
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They got hit pretty hard. If you follow a live update map or any of these sort of update maps, it looked like that collapsed pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort of large gray zone of cities. the guerrilla attacks potentially still ongoing.
Behind the Bastards
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It's been really murky and hard to tell what's going on there, but essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily contested territory between Aleppo and the Euphrates River now, which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over. One of the curious things for me is that the Turkish Air Force and military did not get involved for a while.
Behind the Bastards
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But after about a week, they did, and they started hitting Manbij very, very heavily. And at that point, when the center of Manbij started being contested and far over, the U.S. stepped in. We don't know the details of it, but there seems to have been some kind of negotiation, whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF fighters pulled back across the Euphrates,
Behind the Bastards
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the SDF would assure their protection from any further assault. We don't know how true that is, and we know that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation and what's truth, because stuff is only coming out officially in dribs and drabs.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. For instance, like just before we came on air, I saw a couple of videos being posted by pro-Turkish accounts of purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this border wall waiting to invade. And I realized that they were from 2019 when Sirikani and Talabayat were invaded and they were just reposting material from then.
Behind the Bastards
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as disinformation on these movements and whether the attack's going to happen, what the negotiations between the US and Turkey turned out to be. And the truth is, right now, we don't know exactly what's going on.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, we saw this a few times when Man Beach was reported to have been captured by the SNA and they posted videos of themselves in the middle of the city. And then an hour later, the SDF posted a video from the centre of the city of 20 or 30 dead SNAs blitting about the streets and them flying their own flags. So, yeah. Yeah, it's really it's really hard to tell. It's also really hard.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like anyone who cares about the region or has been there has reported on it. And anyone interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds have built up in the region and others, I should say, is, you know, it's been a multi-ethnic project. If you care about that, it's really hard not to be glued to social media to see what's going on. But it can be quite detrimental to morale.
Behind the Bastards
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It can be quite an act of self-harm to be constantly checking on this because it's so murky. And as you say, things can turn around within two hours of info or disinfo getting out there.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, I think the best way to answer that question is to look at what's already happened. So in 2018 and 19, they already captured three significant cities that were under control of the self-administration. So the first and most famously was Afrin, which was in the far northwest of the country. like just north of Aleppo, sort of jutting out into Turkey. That was a majority Kurdish city.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't know exactly, but it was something like 80 or 90%, which I think is higher than any other city in northern Syria. And it was also like, it had seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in Syria by that point. So the war had been going on for like, what, seven years, and everyone was pretty much untouched. So it was in a pretty good state.
Behind the Bastards
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And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war against ISIS was winding down. And I mean, it's become hell on earth. It's been almost completely depopulated. I think it's less than 10% now Kurdish ethnically.
Behind the Bastards
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It has been ruled by a number of different groups. We can say the SNA, but different groups within the SNA have fought over it. The HTS at times have had control over certain parts of the area. And there's been a lot of infighting. There's been horrendous war crimes committed. rape, murder, and thousands of disappeared people.
Behind the Bastards
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And as you say, they really like to openly put videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos of them mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of committing some re-executions, of wiping out whole towns. It's been awful. And
Behind the Bastards
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The same thing happened again in 2019, around in October, when they captured Sary Karni and Tal Abyad. And it's worth also pointing out that these were not Kurdish-majority cities as far as I'm concerned. I think that Sary Karni maybe was about 50%. And...
Behind the Bastards
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Tel Aviv, which is kind of close to Kobani, I'm pretty sure wasn't Kurdish majority city, but it was organised under the self-administration and it was organised quite effectively. And they committed the same horrific crimes there. They are an anti-Kurdish force, if we can say that. They are... They do have a stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurds. That's not an exaggeration.
Behind the Bastards
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That's something they openly say. But they don't seem to care who they steal from or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go, it's death and destruction. And it still is now. And there's still something like a quarter of a million internally displaced people from Kurds.
Behind the Bastards
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from these areas in northeast Syria, hoping to go back and now having to see the situation get even worse and not knowing if they ever will be able to.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think this is actually a really good political education to see what's happening, because what's been built up in the Northeast has been built up over decades, right? They like to use this analogy of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom.
Behind the Bastards
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They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been brewing underground for years before. And they use this analogy because it took decades to put in place these structures. That's why they were ready
Behind the Bastards
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As soon as the regime, the Assad regime, pulled out and collapsed in the face of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they were ready to build up these structures. They already had self-organized militias. They had the economy planned out. They set to work immediately. And the SNA don't have any of that. They are... a force of convenience.
Behind the Bastards
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They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups before that were defeated in Syria, like ISIS, who are simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves. And that's also very convenient for Turkey because they do the dirty work against the population of northern Syria.
Behind the Bastards
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So I think it's worth saying that that aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience, is something that also works in favour in the event of the worst case of full invasion of northern Syria. I do think they are significantly better prepared than they were in 2018 and 19. And even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project, right?
Behind the Bastards
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It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now... An entire generation of young people in northeast Syria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and emancipated region and people. That's not something you can militarily defeat. So I, you know, I'm not completely hopeless. Obviously, I'd be like devastated if... The worst does happen there.
Behind the Bastards
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But I don't think it means the end of this incredible political. And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not. It really is a revolution in every possible meaning of the word. And it's deeply embedded now.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I mean, this is something that I worry isn't being spoken about enough. I don't as a non-Syrian don't want to say to people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation because people should absolutely should be. And it's their right to be. And I'm like, yeah, extremely happy that.
Behind the Bastards
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this brutal dictator has gone i mean it's it's hard to summarize quite how awful he was and it's it's deeply frustrating that he's probably not going to see justice yeah but it's also really hard to see stuff which is really reminiscent of like uh 1979 tehran 2003 baghdad of a sort of jubilation whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of pogroms being carried out against minorities
Behind the Bastards
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minorities like the Alawites who were in control, and you don't know if the person being executed in the street was a torturer, an intelligence agent. You don't know who they were, but this is happening. But you're also seeing Salafist groups raising their flag, hardline Islamists raising their flag in places like Latakia and Tartus that have significant minority populations.
Behind the Bastards
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I am very, I mean, concerned is the right word. Like, it's hard to feel that spirit of liberation when you see not only these things happening, but that the people who have captured these state institutions are admitted former members of Al-Qaeda. And they are jihadis, hardline people that have now got to very effectively have made themselves out to be moderates. But
Behind the Bastards
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My gut feeling is that we're going to see something like 1979 Tehran of a lot of talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists. But mass executions and oppression is not far around the corner. And I guess when the jubilation dies down, my question is, what's going to happen when
Behind the Bastards
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Minorities do demand their rights or women don't want to wear a hijab inside the buildings of state institutions. And I'm finding it very hard to believe that these men who are professed Islamists are going to allow a moderate future to exist.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, Al-Hol is a really important point to talk about. Al-Hol is a very large camp. It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it is because it's so vast and has different sections. It's near al-Hasakah, which is one of the largest cities in northeast Syria. It mostly contains families who were members or were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed.
Behind the Bastards
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So in the beginning of 2019, ISIS was sort of squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border. And when the state collapsed, or the caliphate collapsed, a lot of these people had nowhere to go. And a lot of them were foreigners who were coming from abroad. And when I say a lot, I mean like tens of thousands.
Behind the Bastards
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There were something like 20,000 families left within Susa and Bagos, like the last parts of the caliphate, to hold out. And they didn't have anywhere to go. There were already camps set up for IDPs and for members of ISIS and families in northern Syria. But al-Hol was rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort of semi-prison, semi-open camp.
Behind the Bastards
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that I think peaked at 75,000 people, which it sounds like a lot on its own, but when you consider that a large city in northern Syria is about 150,000 people, it still is significant. You probably have more accurate recent figures than me, but I think the current population is about 40,000.
Behind the Bastards
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The big problem that the self-administration have had is multitude, really. Many of the people there are foreigners. Many of them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries that either don't want them back or will almost certainly execute them if they're sent back, like Iraq, which is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty in Syria.
Behind the Bastards
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There are some in Al-Hol, but mostly in other camps in the north and east of Syria, former ISIS members like Shammam and Begum who come from countries like the UK who simply won't take them back. And the UK is taking back some families that simply refuses to take back their citizens who joined ISIS as, you know, card-carrying members. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as many families as possible. They've made a big effort to rehabilitate and de-radicalise as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but they're still... yeah, 40,000 or something left there. And these are like really, a lot of them are really radical.
Behind the Bastards
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Like I think, I don't know what an exact number is, but something in the order of 10,000 of them are still like professionally members of ISIS. And they have a lot of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate in Baghdad and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out. And I could not, have imagined how many children there were.
Behind the Bastards
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And this was like, what, five years ago now, coming up to six years ago. So some of them who were, you know, seven, eight, nine years old are now like heading towards their mid-teens. They've spent their entire lives being radicalized. And like, what do you do with them?
Behind the Bastards
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And I think it's no coincidence that in previous Turkish attacks, because Turkey's been attacking the north and east of Syria for the last five, six years now, through the air, through information warfare, a lot of their attacks have focused on trying to break the people out. They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times.
Behind the Bastards
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They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out. and they provide a safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.
Behind the Bastards
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So it's massively in their favour, but of course it's a Pandora's box, because if that does break open, if these people aren't repatriated or aren't de-radicalised, then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives an extremely radical, fascist, Islamist ideology. I don't think they're just going to give it up. They're not going to join this moderate future Syria.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, I mean, I would happily apportion blame. This is entirely on the hands of the coalition. Northern East Syria is a very poor place. It's deeply impoverished. It's been kept impoverished by sanctions, by Turkey. The oil refineries, the industry, the economy has been smashed to pieces. They've held on really well. All credit to them. They have maintained this camp.
Behind the Bastards
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They have tried to give these people a life. But it's pretty awful conditions.
Behind the Bastards
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yeah and this could have been sold if the international community if the coalition in particular united states had uh helped with these repatriations who put political pressure on european countries in particular to take back their citizens and had just provided the funding you know for right they have provided funding i'm not saying they haven't pretty much but like
Behind the Bastards
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It's a drop in the ocean compared to the Department of Defense budget. You know, we're talking a few tens of millions here and there, as opposed to a concerted effort to de-radicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the US.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm incredibly short-sighted. I don't like using the word terror or terrorism because I think they've become meaningless terms. But ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in Europe and the United States. And these people, a lot of them I'm sure, would happily do so given the opportunity. So I don't think the threat is sufficiently understood in the West.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar atrocities have been carried out in Europe, we see international tribunals, we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, we see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Milosevic, like the Nuremberg trials. And ISIS was a massive state. It had something like 10 million people.
Behind the Bastards
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inhabitants it committed multiple genocides you know and this isn't just you know people in the region saying oh they're committing just like these are like western highly studied highly understood accepted by western states as genocide against like the azidis They committed horrendous atrocities. They posed an international threat and a massive regional threat.
Behind the Bastards
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And at the end of the caliphate, as a territorial realm, as a serious military presence, it just disappeared off the radar. I think this is a really... It really shows the sort of racist and colonial mindset behind this rules-based international order that the people who were their victims and who had left to pick up the pieces after it's got very little support or recognition.
Behind the Bastards
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And they've been calling for tribunals for years and it's just fallen on deaf ears.
Behind the Bastards
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It's also a question that's really hard to answer given how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know, I personally find it hard to... to engage and ask for help and ask for solidarity when there's a genocide being committed next door. But we might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria. And I do think we should be taking it seriously.
Behind the Bastards
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And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support, anything on that spectrum, it's not just the material contribution that you can make. It's the people that do...
Behind the Bastards
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really feel left out they feel betrayed they feel let down by the international community by the rest of the world yeah and any act of solidarity goes on incredibly well like the first year i was there i was basically useless because i didn't speak the language i didn't know my way around i was like a burden on society more or less
Behind the Bastards
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And for people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity. And it's not about being useful. It's about that act. It's about more than that, is what I'm trying to say. And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like this is, you know, incredibly, incredibly important to find to do it.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, absolutely. I think I would just add to that to say that solidarity with any group is a long term project, right? You're not going to jump in and be able to make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time, like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades Fulon and there's genocide in northern Syria, that isn't the end of it. It's a massive international movement.
Behind the Bastards
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And there are practices from it that are being put in place in Turkey. And things that actually don't even have anything to do with the Kurds as a nation. And there are ways of organizing. There are methods that they use. There's personality analysis. There's criticism and self-criticism. There's a lot of that that goes far beyond a single geographic region.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think engaging with that can... And I've seen with my own eyes since I've been back, there's a lot of groups around the UK that use techniques... for self-organisation within land rights movement, within worker struggle, within anti-cuts campaigning.
Behind the Bastards
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And these have got nothing to do with Rojava, but they have seen that through solidarity with Rojava and Kurdistan, that there are ways they can improve their own practice and their own actions.
Behind the Bastards
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Definitely the RIC, that's the Rojava Information Centre. They are probably the best source on the ground in Rojava and Rojava They are a collective of journalists, a mixture of locals and internationalists who've been working there for six years now. So they're Rojava IC on various social media platforms. You can follow me as at Lapinesque, L-A-P-I-N-E-S-Q-U-E.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm also posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm posting updates from friends and people I know there. And my take on the situation based on my experiences of being there for almost five years.