Category Archives: Kurds

Nagorno-Karabakh: Azerbaijan accuses Armenia of rocket attack

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At least one person killed in Ganja incident, as former Soviet republics move closer to war

Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has escalated dramatically after Baku accused Armenian forces of firing rockets at Ganja, which lies outside the contested territory.

At least one civilian was killed and four more injured in the attack on Sunday on Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second largest city, 100km (60 miles) north of the Karabakh capital, Stepanakert.

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‘So old he was losing his hair’: survivors urge MPs to end scandal of UK’s child brides

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A new bill could close loophole allowing under-18s to marry in England and Wales, as charities warn Covid has exacerbated hidden child marriage

When Payzee Mahmod was married at 16 to a man nearly twice her age she didn’t understand the words spoken during the Islamic ceremony – and nobody thought to translate them for her.

The teenager, who loved fashion and pop music, was preparing to start college. “I had just finished school and the idea of not wearing a uniform was exciting to me,” she remembers. “Instead I found myself trussed up in a wedding dress, with elaborate jewellery, feeling like a sale item at an auction.”

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Turkey issues arrest warrants for 82 over pro-Kurdish protests

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Mayor among those wanted for unspecified offences during 2014 protests sparked by Isis seizure of Kobane

Turkish authorities have issued arrest warrants for 82 people, including a mayor, over pro-Kurdish protests six years ago, officials and local media have said.

The warrants relate to October 2014 protests in Turkey sparked by the seizure of the mainly Kurdish-Syrian town of Kobane by Islamic State fighters.

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Yazidi children and rape victims ‘left abandoned’ after Isis captivity – report

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Amnesty calls for action to help victims overcome trauma, as families return home to landscape littered with landmines

Child survivors of Islamic State captivity and their families have been left to fend for themselves when dealing with lasting trauma and health complications, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

Almost 2,000 Yazidi children living in the Kurdish regional government area have been “effectively abandoned”, according to a new report highlighting their struggles to recover from the violence inflicted by Isis.

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‘Coronavirus ruined everything’: the long wait for new limbs in Kurdistan

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Decades of war have resulted in a high demand for prosthetics – and patients are anxious to visit clinics as they finally reopen

Concentration is etched on Hussein’s face as he walks along a scuffed yellow line painted on the floor of the clinic’s rehabilitation room. He’s getting a feel for his new prosthetic.

Hussein lost his left leg below the knee in 1987 when he stepped on a landmine while fishing at Lake Dukan, around 100km (62 miles) east of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Mines and other unexploded remnants of successive wars litter the landscape, causing new injuries every year. More than half the clinic’s 15,100 patients are amputees. Roughly 4,600 of them lost limbs as a result of conflict – 2,500 of these to landmines.

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‘Yazidi women are strong’: Iraq’s female landmine clearance teams

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Isis planted mines across Sinjar and displaced the Yazidi community. Now a group of women are clearing the way for the return of their people

Behind Hana Khider is a large grey wall map, with the minefields her team have been clearing marked in green. “This is the place where Yazidis lived together,” she says. “It’s where I lived in my childhood; I have so many memories here, it’s very important to me.”

The place is Sinjar, or Shingal as Yazidis know it, on Iraq’s north-western border with Syria. Khider, 28, is speaking via video call from her office in the region.

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Islamic State prisoners escape from Syrian jail after militants riot

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Unconfirmed reports of deaths as inmates overwhelm SDF guards in city of Hasakah

Several members of Islamic State have escaped from prison after militants sparked a riot and seized control of part of a large jail in north-east Syria, Kurdish and US military sources have said.

Prisoners broke down walls and tore off internal doors during the unrest on Sunday night at Ghouiran prison in the city of Hasakah, overwhelming guards from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Washington’s Kurdish-led ground partner in the fight against Isis.

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US isolationism leaves Middle East on edge as new decade dawns

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With Trump deciding against protecting allies, old rivalries are converging across the region

Throughout the Middle East’s modern history, a constant remained – the US held a prominent stake and would throw its weight around to protect its interests and allies. The maxim held true as ideologies rose and fell, Gulf monarchies, Israel, and Arab nationalist police states took root – and war and insurrection periodically raged.

But it ended during Donald Trump’s third year, a time when an isolationist, unworldly president began to see regional interests through a much narrower lens. The effect has been profound and 2020 will continue the process of recalibration by traditional friends of the US without a country whose clout they used to defer to and whose agenda they could more or less understand.

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New Zealand would be honoured to take Behrouz Boochani. Australia be damned | Morgan Godfery

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The moral case for the former Manus island detainee becoming a citizen is as simple as ‘asylum is a human right’

I wonder if it winds up Peter Dutton to know that Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, award-winning author and former Manus Island detainee, is a free man in the continent’s orbit. Boochani, the best-known witness, critic and victim of Australia’s offshore “processing centres”, remains in New Zealand after his 30-day visa came to an end. No one quite knows what the No Friend But the Mountains author is planning next, but it seems safe to assume that sooner or later he’ll lodge an application for asylum in New Zealand. A permanent reminder to Dutton, his predecessors and the country’s immigration detention system that they are not as close to vanishing the “boat people” problem as they might have thought.

For their part New Zealand’s policymakers fear as much with headlines suggesting if Boochani’s hypothetical asylum application is successful it could “fuel tensions with Australia”. The problem is Behrouz Boochani, New Zealander, would enjoy free movement between his new home and his old incarcerators, unless Dutton and the gang insert new exceptions in the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement. This is the “back door” the Coalition government in Canberra is so afraid of, and the political problem preventing Scott Morrison from taking up Jacinda Ardern’s invitation to resettle the last remaining detainees on Manus.

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Ilhan Omar writes to US Syria envoy over Turkish white phosphorus allegations

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Congresswoman calls on US Syria envoy to give full briefing on October incident in border town

Four US congressional Democrats have written to Donald Trump’s Syria envoy asking him to spell out what information the US has about the alleged use of white phosphorus by Turkey against Syrian Kurdish civilians in October.

Ilhan Omar and three of her colleagues in the House of Representatives called on Jim Jeffrey to provide a full briefing – in private if necessary – into whether it believes the incident during the Turkish invasion two months ago amounts to a war crime.

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Birth of boy sparks renewed calls to rescue Australians in Syria’s squalid al-Hawl camp

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Brutal winter, poor healthcare and limited food raises fears for welfare of infant, born to Sydney woman Rayan Hamdoush

An Australian woman has given birth to a baby boy in the al-Hawl camp in Syria, prompting revived calls for Australia to rescue 67 nationals still held in the camp.

Rayan Hamdoush, 24, from western Sydney, was pregnant when she entered al-Hawl. She gave birth to the boy on 30 November. The boy’s father, Samer Hajj Obeid, also from Sydney, is missing.

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Macron clashes with both Erdoğan and Trump at Nato summit

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French president is rebuked by Trump over Nato criticism after row with Turkey about Kurds

Nato disunity was on full display on the opening day of the alliance’s summit in London as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, accused Turkey of colluding with Islamic State proxies while Donald Trump described Macron’s criticisms of Nato’s “brain death” as insulting and “very, very nasty”.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for his part threatened again to veto Nato’s defence plan for the Baltics unless Nato endorsed its own assessment that Syrian Kurdish fighters on Turkey’s borders were terrorists, a definition that Macron and the Pentagon rejected.

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Revealed: how UK technology fuelled Turkey’s rise to global drone power

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UK-based manufacturer supplied crucial missile component to Turkish drone-maker during development stage

Turkey was able to circumvent a US export ban on killer drones with the help of a missile component first developed in the UK, allowing Ankara to become an emerging power in the lethal technology, which experts warn is dangerously proliferating.

The vital assistance from a factory in Brighton has helped Turkey on its way to become the second biggest user of armed drones in the world – one of a number of countries emulating methods first used by the US in its “war on terror”.

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Mike Pence makes unannounced visit to Iraq

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  • Visit meant to reassure US allies in fight against Isis
  • Pence is highest-level American to travel there since withdrawal

Mike Pence made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Saturday, the highest-level American to visit since Donald Trump ordered a pullback of US forces in neighbouring Syria two months ago.

Related: Trump says FBI tried to 'overthrow the presidency'

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Behrouz Boochani, voice of Manus Island refugees, is free in New Zealand

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Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist – a multiple award-winner for documenting life in Australia’s offshore detention system – has left Papua New Guinea

•The story behind Behrouz Boochani’s flight to freedom

Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist who became the voice of those incarcerated on Manus Island, has landed in New Zealand and says he will never return to Papua New Guinea or Australia’s immigration regime.

“I will never go back to that place,” he told the Guardian, shortly after leaving PNG. “I just want to be free of the system, of the process. I just want to be somewhere where I am a person, not just a number, not just a label ‘refugee’.”

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Syrian Kurd leader hits out at UK’s ‘almost invisible’ response to Turkish invasion

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Ilham Ahmed says Britain unwilling to offend Ankara fearing post-Brexit isolation

The leader of the Syrian Kurd civilian government has accused Britain of being almost invisible in its condemnation of the Turkish invasion in Syria, saying the UK appeared unwilling to offend Ankara because it feared isolation after leaving the European Union.

Ilham Ahmed, the president of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, criticised Donald Trump’s decision to give the green light to the Turkish invasion of north-east Syria as a historic crime that will leave the US struggling for allies across the Middle East unless Congress can force the US president to change his thinking quickly.

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Young Kurdish feminists make me hopeful for the future of the region

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A conference on sexual violence in Iraqi Kurdistan has given women an overdue opportunity to voice their experiences

When I received an email from the Kurdish feminist writer and activist Houzan Mahmoud, asking if I would speak at the first conference on sexual violence against women and girls to be held in Iraqi Kurdistan, I could barely contain my excitement.

Mahmoud, a campaigner for Kurdish and Iraqi women’s rights – “honour” killings, the rape and abduction of women in Iraq and the imposition of Islamic sharia law are among the areas she tackles – was supporting the Sofia Society, a group of roughly 40 young feminists.

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Car bomb explodes in Syrian town captured by Turkey from Kurds

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At least 13 people killed in explosion in northern border town of Tal Abyad

A car bomb exploded in a northern Syrian town along the border with Turkey on Saturday, killing 13 people. Turkey’s defence ministry said about 20 others were wounded when the bomb exploded in central Tal Abyad, which forces backed by Ankara captured from Kurdish-led fighters last month.

The ministry harshly condemned the attack, which it blamed on Syrian Kurdish fighters, and called on the international community to take a stance against this “cruel terror organisation”. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

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Kurds call on US to block Turkish military drones from Syrian air space

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  • Unmanned weapons ‘targeting anything they wish to’
  • Kurds say Turks have killed 509 civilians and 412 troops

Syrian Kurds are asking the Pentagon to block US-controlled air space over north-eastern Syria to Turkish armed drones which they claim are causing significant civilian casualties.

Ilham Ahmed, the head of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), said the Kurds would hold the Pentagon responsible for Turkish war crimes if they did nothing to guarantee protection from the air.

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Syrian Kurds say spy stole Baghdadi’s underpants for DNA test

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Syrian Democratic Forces also claim they played a key role in tracking down Baghdadi to a compound in northern Syria

Syrian Kurds say they managed to place a spy in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s inner circle who stole a pair of the Isis leader’s underpants to prove his identity and then helped guide US soldiers to his Syrian hideout.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claim they played a key role in tracking down Baghdadi to a compound in northern Syria where he was reportedly planning his escape over the nearby border into Turkey.

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