Mehmet Öcalan met the PKK leader on 11 September 2016 after an 18 month isolation and ban on communications imposed by the Turkish government. Mehmet Öcalan said the Kurdish leader did not want to meet him when he was finally allowed access to Imrali. According to brother Öcalan, it had normally taken the PKK leader 5 minutes to come to previous meetings over the past 18 years, but took him 30-40 minutes this time, and only after he was convinced by prison administrators. Öcalan said his brother was furious at recent developments, adding: "I already guessed that he did not want to come out…

Turkey backed FSA militants, made up of Nour al-Din al-Zenki Battalions, Faylaq al-Sham (Sham Legion), Sultan Murad Brigade and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra) among others -all Salafist/Islamist groups responsible for countless human rights crimes- have already declared they will march onto Manbij, which had rejoiced with joy recently after being liberated from Islamic State by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Images of women taking off their enforced niqabs and smoking, and men shaving off their beards is still fresh in the memory of those following events in Syria. After…

This article was written 2 years ago at the time that ISIS terrorist was at the peak of there power, it is still worth reading it! August 17, 2014 Written by John Rees The Kurdish struggle for national liberation is one of the longest in the Middle East. The 30 million Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state. At the end of First World War the major powers divided the Kurdish areas between four nations: Turkey, where most Kurds live, Syria, Iraq and Iran. US President Woodrow…

In the 20th century, it was clear what people meant when they used the word “revolution”. Mao Zedong said it as well as anyone: “A revolution is not a dinner party…it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another”. The founders of Turkey’s PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) had this definition in mind in 1978 when they laid out a strategy of people’s war leading to an independent Kurdish…

Even worse, though not surprising, is the widely held belief that Barzani endorsed the invasion after a meeting between him and Erdogan yesterday. Betrayed, surrounded, suffocating amidst the stifling stench of treachery, the YPG-YPJ-SDF, weary from the recent liberation of Manbij and then the conflict with Assad in Hasakah, Rojava will remain indefatigable. The problem that Turkey, Assad, USA, Iran and cronies face is no longer the "Kurdish Question", which their fascist, imperialist, violently colonial Orientalist minds have always seen as the "Kurdish Problem"; What they face is the “Kurdish…

  Öcalan has been kept in solitary confinement by the Turkish authorities in the prison island of Imrali since 1999 and has been denied access to his lawyers since 2011. No-one, including his family, has been able to see him since April 2015 when a delegation from the Peace and Democracy Party (HDP) last visited him. He now leads a solitary life in total isolation. It is well understood from international experience that in order to end conflict all parties to that conflict must be involved in seeking a solution.…

  Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the  author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of www.kodar.info Shortly after WWII a Europe-wide network of secret armies was organised under the aegis of NATO, tasked with providing military and intelligence resistance in the event of a feared Soviet invasion. Modelled on the resistance movements of the war years, many of these “stay behind” units remained faithful to their original mandate. But by the early 1960s – under the pressures of anti-communist politicking and flirtations…

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of KODAR.info ISIS has executed thousands of Yazidis and abducted a myriad others from the Sinjar area, raped them repeatedly and sold them as sex slaves. Nearly 200,000 Yazidis have been displaced in northern Iraq, where the large majority lives in refugee camps. Forty-two years ago, similar crimes were committed in Cyprus by another occupying army, which is also a NATO member. In the summer of 1974, the Turkish military invaded…

Why was Qamişlo targeted? The city of Qamişlo was named as the proposed capital of the self-declared federal system of ‘Rojava and Northern Syria’ earlier in 2016. A multi-ethnic city of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, and Armenians, it’s on the other side of the Turkish border from the city of Nusaybin – one of the largely-Kurdish communities in Turkey which has been destroyed in recent months by NATO’s second biggest army. Daesh quickly claimed responsibility for the massacre of 27 July, claiming it was in retaliation for a Rojava-led military operation aimed at closing the final link between Daesh and Turkey in Syria. The…

After months of silence over the threat faced by Kurds from ISIS, the world is now finally watching, even if the ‘international community’ remains conspicuously quiet. However, many Western responses, be it from scholars, journos or activists, have somewhat predictably retracted into recycled critiques of US and UK imperialism, often at the expense of missing what is truly exceptional and noteworthy in recent developments. So, in the style of contemporary leftist listicles, here are four things we can and should learn from events in and around Kobanê. 1. It’s Time to Question…