Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decision to call an early general election on June 24 — a year and a half before it was due — is a sign of weakness and desperation, according to opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Lezgin Botan.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Turkey has condemned Israel’s slaughter of unarmed Palestinians, but the Turkish regime commits the same atrocities against Kurdish people.
The Afrin canton in Northern Syria is under sustained assault from invading Turkish forces and allied Islamist gangs.
The Turkish invasion, accompanied by reports of massacres and use of chemical weapons, aims to destroy the progressive, democratic Kurdish-led revolution in Syria’s north, which places women’s liberation at its centre.
The People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a broad-based left-wing group largely initiated by Kurdish forces in Turkey, has faced the full brunt of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown.
More than 10,000 HDP members have been arrested, along with its leaders and dozens of elected officials — often on trumped-up charges of “supporting terrorism” in retaliation for the HDP’s support for the struggle of the Kurdish community for democratic rights.
On January 20, Turkey launched an invasion of Afrin, one of the three cantons that make up the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (also known as Rojava), the site of a profound, Kurdish-led social revolution based on multi-ethnic participatory democracy and women’s liberation.
The invasion has killed dozens of civilians in an area that has welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria’s conflict. Turkey’s actions would be impossible without at least passive acceptance from several great powers active in Syria. Cihad Hammy looks at the motivations for various major players.
The dark clouds of 21st-century fascism are once again hanging over the heads of the people of northern Syria. As if the inhabitants of the region often referred to as Rojava haven’t suffered enough over the course of the past 7 years of war, the Turkish state has come to the conclusion that the time is ripe to pick up the fallen, bloodied sword from the corpse that is Islamic State.
Together with Salafist mercenaries carrying flags of the Syrian ‘rebels’ – one of the many components of what at one historical juncture seemingly all so long ago was a cohesive ‘Free Syrian Army’ – Erdogan’s regime vows a ‘swift operation’ to destroy ‘terrorism’ in Afrin.
The left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has condemned Turkey’s invasion of the Afrin region in northern Syria (known as Rojava in Kurdish) in collaboration with mostly jihadi Syrian militias.
The HDP, with strong roots in Turkey’s Kurdish minority, has itself faced worsening repression from the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Afrin invasion: Turkey attacks northern Syria’s democratic revolution — with Russian and US approval
Three years after Kurdish-led forces liberated the northern Syrian city of Kobane from ISIS — after a months-long siege that captured the world’s imagination — the democratic, multi-ethnic and feminist revolution in Syria’s north is facing a new assault.
Hundreds of thousands of people rallied in the Turkish city of Istanbul after a 280-mile Justice March against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The demonstration was in response to the widespread jailings and dismissals authorised by the Turkish government after last year’s failed coup attempt.
The mood in Turkey is low, and not just among those who oppose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Even some of his supporters are disoriented by developments in the country.
In the aftermath of the failed coup of July 15 last year, Erdogan orchestrated the dismissal of tens of thousands of government employees. The figures from the ongoing Turkish purges are startling.
Thousands of opposition supporters chanted, “We know we won, we know they lost, we are not afraid”, in the streets of major cities after Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed victory in the April 16 referendum to strengthen presidential power.
Late in the evening police attacked opposition demonstrators outside the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The July 15 coup attempt was a nightmare. Kurds remember the terrible army coups in Turkey’s past. After the coups, Kurdish people were jailed, killed and tortured.
Kurds are against military coups. By nightfall on July 15, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) had immediately condemned the coup attempt.
Kurds thought that after the coup attempt, there may be a return to the peace process.
The reasons behind this were:
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