It Could Happen Here - The ISIS Detainees in AANES and Why the International Community Won’t Help

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

James is joined by Meghan Bodette to discuss how the AANES has been left to deal with the thousands of ISIS fighters in its territory after the defeat of the territorial ‘caliphate’ and the impact of drone strikes on the region. @kurdishpeaceorg onTwitter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

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We're picking up where we left off at the end of last week to discuss more about the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria, and perhaps more specifically to talk about the detainees, the ISIS detainees in Al-Hol camp and in other camps around there. How are you, Megan? I'm doing well. Thank you, James. Thank you for having me on for this important conversation about a really critical security and humanitarian issue that we're seeing in Northeast Syria these days. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So I think to start out with, would you be comfortable giving a sort of baseline explanation of what's happening with these ISIS detainees and why, despite the

fact that many of them are citizens of other countries, there haven't been a return there? Yeah, that's a very important place to start with. So essentially, after the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2019, by the Syrian Democratic Forces and the International Coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration, which is the political body governing northeast Syria, ended up with 10s of 1000s of ISIS detainees and the family members of these ISIS members as well. And in the Al-Hol camp, you now have a population of essentially ISIS-affiliated women and the children of ISIS members who are now housed in that camp as well. And this camp is a serious humanitarian issue. You have these children who are in very difficult conditions. It's a massive security problem for the surrounding Syrian and Iraqi communities

that were victimized by ISIS and the world. ISIS openly wants to reconstitute itself. It is operating inside the camp clandestinely to reconstitute itself. It wants to break prisoners out and go right back to its genocidal policies against minorities in the region like Yazidis and Christians and to continue terror attacks, not only in Iraq and Syria, but around the world. It's also a real drain on the resources of the autonomous administration and the SDF themselves, who we have to remember are not a state actor, but are dealing with the sort of problems that even the wealthiest and most militarily established state actors would have trouble with. So they've ended up in this unenviable position of having to take care of essentially criminals from around the world who

came to their country to commit mass atrocities, while the victims of these ISIS crimes across northern and eastern Syria, and victims of the subsequent Turkish invasions that northern and eastern Syria suffered during and after the fight against ISIS really lack basic resources. Now, this is something I heard a lot on the ground when I was in the region in February and March, speaking to people from Afrin, which was invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2018, and to people from Sere Kaniye and Tal Abyad, which were invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2019, many of them asked rightly why there were so many resources from international bodies and NGOs

and governments provided towards the ISIS detainees in Al-Hol and the ISIS-affiliated individuals there, when their communities, their families who had done nothing other than simply living in areas that Turkey decided to invade and occupy, who were displaced because of that in what experts, including myself, would refer to as ethnic cleansing, these communities are receiving nothing from the international community. You know, they feel forgotten and they have some serious questions about that. Of course, the autonomous administration has many needs and many pressing security problems that it simply can't devote enough resources to when it's tasked with managing the world's ISIS members. So in a recent study that we published at the Kurdish Peace

Institute by journalist Matt Broomfield, who spent a lot of time on the ground in northeast Syria during and after the defeat of ISIS, he found that just 4% of foreign ISIS fighters held by Syrian Kurdish authorities have been repatriated since 2019. 4%. Most of the repatriations have been women and children, not the fighters themselves who are housed in prisons. But of course, the women and children are a humanitarian issue and a security issue too. So think about that. Those are uh dangerous numbers yeah i think that differentiation between like fighters and women and children is interesting and perhaps one we should like pick apart a little bit because um there's a bit we talked about this before we

recorded like there's there's a betrayal uh certainly of like western women who went to join ISIS as having been sort of victims in their own right, which some of them were very young, right? And might not have been making like adult choices at that time. And that's one thing. But like a lot of these people willingly participated in an extremely oppressive and violent regime. And they sort of are being, they're often not portrayed as such in the press. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Look, what I always go back to when I talk about this issue is reading accounts from Yazidi women and children who survived ISIS captivity, who've said on multiple occasions that the women were no less brutal than the men and that they were willing participants in every aspect of the

worst of ISIS crimes, of genocide, of crimes against humanity, against the Yazidi people, and of course, all the other peoples that ISIS targeted. So that I think when you have these genocide survivors saying that, no, these women participated fully in these crimes, they facilitated these crimes, they made this system participated fully in these crimes. They facilitated these crimes. They made this system of genocide, of crimes against humanity possible. That's something we have to listen to. And I'm glad that you bring up the Western media portrayal because you really, you see this idea that the women could not have been perpetrators themselves when what we hear on the ground is that that's not true.

And what legal cases have begun to find is that that's not true either. There's been trials in Europe for ISIS-affiliated women for their complicity in acts of genocide against the Yazidi community. And you know, one point that you hear very commonly on the ground is that how can there have only been one or two, just a handful of trials? I'm not sure the exact number, but after all of these people missing, all of these people killed, how are all of these ISIS members? And that's why I said, you know, ISIS affiliated women, because I don't think I do agree with you. It's a disservice to just refer to them as ISIS brides or whatever sensationalistic media framing you

have. These people simply aren't being put on trial. And one of the reasons for that is that when we come to female members of ISIS, there is this perception both in media and from governments, from international institutions, that these women are victims, that because they're women, because they subscribed willingly to a political and ideological system that was very, very oppressive of women, that puts women only into certain roles as housewives, as mothers of the next generation of ISIS, that these women couldn't have committed atrocities. But they have. They did. atrocities, but they have, they did. And you know, what we're hearing right now in some of the reporting that's coming out of Northeast Syria is that even within the camps, these women have continued to commit some of the most serious abuses that ISIS has been committing. There's reports that they have raped, sexually assaulted the teenage boys who are in the camp in order to essentially become pregnant and raise more children to create that next generation of ISIS that they seek to create.

And so this continued perpetration of sexual violence against these boys who've done nothing other than had the misfortune to have their parents be members of ISIS. You know, this is a very, very serious allegation. The reporting about this is something that needs to be taken very seriously. Like I said, this is a massive human rights crisis for these children. And it is, you know, these women are no less dangerous and no less culpable for their crimes than their male counterparts who joined ISIS. Yeah, I think that's very fair to say. And it's somewhat of a sexist outlet to be like,

our women couldn't have had agency in the way that men clearly have been held accountable for. And I think the last issue you raised is obviously pretty horrible. But also, we should at least dig into a little bit, I think, the ongoing, not only the abuse of children, but the attempt to indoctrinate children into that same extremist ideology. I've seen videos of kids training with little wooden guns and raising another generation of people who believe in this kind of hateful outlook. And can you talk a little bit about how common that is? Or I guess you don't know entirely, but can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, that is something that none of us

know how common it is because of the sort of difficulty of accessing that information. But if you look at what is coming in from sources from North and East Syria, from international reporting on the camp, these women are indoctrinating their children into the ISIS ideology. They have said many times over in many of their communications that their goal is to raise the next generation of ISIS fighters. There's no reason to believe that the majority of these women have given up on their beliefs. And there is evidence that this is what they're trying to do. And of course, when you look at the broader situation that these children are in, it's a situation that's exceedingly conducive to radicalization because

of the poor conditions in the camps, because of the fact that they remain with their mothers, many of whom believe firmly in ISIS ideology and who see the role of women in ISIS as doing exactly that, as passing down this ideology. And, you know, when these children, they can't be safely repatriated to their countries, they can't be put into safe environments where they can receive the support they need, the positive influences they need, any kind of medical or psychological help that they need. being perpetrated and the adults there, these women continuing to pass this down on these children who, again, have done nothing to be put in the situation that they're in. They're continuing to be victimized by the actions of their parents and the other ISIS members.

So and the international community, too, is at fault here, you know, for refusing to repatriate at least these children and to try ISIS perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Yeah. In some cases, they've even been like had their citizenship stripped from them of the countries that they came from. The UK has done that, for example. Right. Which is kind of just failing to do anything to acknowledge that this is an international problem that they have some power fixing. Oh, completely. And that's something we can get into is the international dynamic surrounding these issues, because it's obviously very closely related to the ISIS issue, but it touches on so many other very internationalized conflicts as well. Yeah, let's do that. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max.

You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging

into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Perhaps before we explain the way that nations that are more distant from this are engaging with it,

we should talk about how nations that are more proximal to this are engaging with it. We should talk about how nations that are more proximal to this are engaging with it and specifically how at times it seems like Turkish drone strikes, which we've discussed previously on our podcast, so people will be familiar with them, have at the very least not helped the SDF to keep these camps secure. And in some cases, to keep these camps secure, right? And in some cases, you can see there's a video that the YPJ have of these people celebrating a drone strike inside the camp. Can you talk about the impact these drone strikes have? Look, something that has been reported by journalists, by local sources, and by all sorts of international researchers and experts since the earliest days of the war against ISIS is that Turkey wanted ISIS to succeed in its mission of taking over northern Iraq and northern Syria in order to not only destroy Kurdish political and military structures operating there, including the YPG, the YPJ, later the SDF, and the Autonomous Administration, but also to destroy the social base for any form of Kurdish autonomy, any kind of multi-ethnic project to potentially be able to exist there either now

or in the future. And this facilitation of the rise of ISIS reached such a level that you've had legal experts through the Yazidi Justice Committee, which published an in-depth report on this last year, find based on a review of the evidence that Turkey was, quote, complicit in the commission of genocide, end quote, by ISIS, by allowing fighters to cross its borders, to join the group, allowing ISIS-related economic activity to go on, and other forms of facilitation of the rise of ISIS when it was committing its most serious crimes. So this is not something new. The way that these drone strikes specifically impact this issue, they're part of the broader Turkish campaign of aggression against northeast Syria. Obviously, the two ground invasions of Afrin and of Serekani and Tal Abyad had very negative impacts on the fight against ISIS. And the drone strikes now, first of all, they make it difficult for any SDF or autonomous administration structure to simply do the day-to-day work of providing security and

providing the government. You know, if a government official or a member of the local security forces has to modify their behavior, has to modify where they go, how they interact with their constituents, you know, what kind of missions they can conduct to avoid being assassinated in a drone strike, they're simply not going to be as effective, right? So this is a problem in many areas. It certainly impacts the counter-ISIS mission. And Turkey has specifically started to increasingly target ANES, SDF, and Asayish internal security forces personnel who are directly engaged in counter-ISIS missions. We saw this in late 2022 when there were severe Turkish air operations following a bombing in Istanbul that Turkey, based on all evidence, falsely

attempted to attribute to Kurdish groups despite there being no real evidence supporting that claim. These attacks targeted civilians, civilian infrastructure, and SDF forces engaged in key counter-ISIS missions, including SDF forces involved in securing the Al-Hol camp. And now we've even started to see, in addition to these anti-SDF, anti-autonomous administration drone strikes, Turkey's been using drones to fire essentially warning shots at the international coalition led by the U.S. and the other coalition countries itself. We saw this in November when there was a drone strike on the joint SDF coalition base, where the SDF and the international community worked together to plan ongoing counter-ISIS

missions. And earlier this year, in I believe April of this year, the drone strike on Sulaymaniyah International Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, where there was a joint SDF coalition convoy, where SDF Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Kobani was present and US forces were also present. That strike, for all intents and purposes, was Turkey's attempt not only to threaten the SDF and the autonomous administration, but to threaten the coalition as well, specifically for its continuing counter ISIS partnership with Syrian Kurds. So this has risen to a level where Turkey is not only using these to disrupt governance and security at the local level in the autonomous administration. and security at the local level in the autonomous administration. It's not only using them against locally led SDF, YPG led counter ISIS missions, but Turkey is using drones to threaten the entire global counter ISIS campaign, of which on paper,

it's formally a member. So there you go. Yeah. And Turkey is kind of, we talked about this again before, how it pressured newer NATO members, Finland, Sweden, to even stop accepting Kurdish refugees, right? Yeah. members of NATO. It's making it as hard as possible for people in this part of the world to have the stability and peace and the things that they fought so hard for for such a long time. As far as the international community exists, which is a pretty nebulous thing to pin down, national community exists, which is a pretty nebulous thing to really kind of pin down. But what is specifically this US-led coalition to defeat ISIS, I think they call it,

doing to help? And I guess a little more broadly building on that, this coalition has a very narrow focus in a place where there are a lot of different aggressors to include various other Islamist groups, to include the Turkish state, and obviously the state in Syria. Can you explain a little bit about how the mission of this coalition is narrow in a way that helps it doing the things that people on the ground then need to ensure peace and stability? Yeah, exactly. That's a really important question. Because as you said, this international relationship with Northeast Syria is very narrowly built on a counter-ISIS focus, which means a military focus. So there's relationships between security forces and

security forces. What we don't see are political relationships. And this connects to a wide variety of issues related to this immediate problem of ISIS, of securing ISIS prisoners, of bringing ISIS perpetrators of genocide and war crimes to justice. But it also connects to the deeper problem of the kind of long-term stability in Syria that's necessary to end this ongoing civil war, to bring justice to the victims of ISIS and to all other abuses and atrocities during the 12 years of conflict in Syria, and to prevent the next endless war in this region from inevitably taking place in the future. So we have this narrow military partnership. The reason that this relationship evolved in this way was going back to the role of Turkey, because the United States and its European allies

had no other option but to partner with Kurdish groups if they wanted to achieve a territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. There was no force other than the SDF and the YPG and the YPJ at that time that would be capable of the military responsibility of defeating ISIS. northeastern Syria that held out long enough where the United States and the International Coalition realized that their only option, if they wanted to defeat ISIS on the ground, was to partner with these forces. Before that, also, we're recording this in August, the situation in Sinjar, where ISIS had gone in, had committed genocide against the Yazidi community, and were the only people who were able to actually come in and help Yazidis defend themselves and evacuate refugees to safety in Syria, were again the YPG, the YPJ, and the PKK guerrillas as well. Because these Kurdish forces were able to help local civilians in Sinjar defend themselves and evacuate so many refugees to safety, it forced the

international community's hand to act. The PKK intervened in Sinjar to start that humanitarian mission on August 4th. U.S. airstrikes began on August 7th. It was this local response from these non-state actors that forced the international community, you know, these states with actual treaty obligations to respond to and prevent mass atrocities, to take action. But because Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist group, it views the YPG and the YPJ as indistinguishable from the PKK and therefore as a terrorist group, the entire counter-ISIS mission from the very beginning was faced with this question of how these states that wanted to fight ISIS could do so without offending their relationships

with Turkey as a member of NATO and an ally in other respects. So this connects specifically to the ISIS issue, not only because the contradiction here dates back to the counter-ISIS campaign, but because actual international trials for ISIS members, actual security policies that could address the problems in al-Hul would legitimize the SDF and the Autonomous Administration on the international stage and would legitimize the political philosophies behind what they're doing, all of which Turkey deems to be a very serious national security threat to its existence. I mean, imagine you have a Kurdish woman judge questioning an ISIS member responsible for potentially European and American casualties,

certainly responsible for casualties and all sorts of abuses across Iraq and Syria, about the evidence that we have, that the international community has, that Northeast Syria has about how Turkey facilitated ISIS actions, you know, with the YPG and the YPJ there for security, with international observers from the U.S. and other coalition countries facilitating, providing legal and security support, that would absolutely destroy Turkey's narrative about what individuals and entities are terrorists and which ones have actually contributed not only to the territorial militarily defeat of ISIS, contributed not only to the territorial militarily defeat of ISIS, but to social and political and governance projects that are able to prevent, you know, the resurgence of the next ISIS. So,

you know, this kind of fear of building political relationships with the autonomous administration, with this fear of legitimizing the Autonomous Administration project and helping it address security problems in a way that would both increase its standing and legitimacy locally and internationally, and would show how the actions of states like Turkey contributed to prolonging and intensifying the civil war in Syria. intensifying the civil war in Syria. States simply don't want to do that yet. But, you know, when we look at the long-term consequences of whether it's allowing Turkey to continue aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and more broadly to pursue a military solution to its Kurdish conflict, whether it's allowing ISIS atrocities to go unpunished, you know, leaving communities that were impacted by ISIS to be essentially re-traumatized and left to live in difficult conditions, you know, not receiving justice, and allowing these ISIS members to continue to have the space to attempt to reconstitute their

group and go back to the kind of atrocities they were committing and attacks they were carrying out worldwide in 2014, 2015. In the long run, this sort of appeasement of Turkey over the issue of the Kurdish question and the role of the autonomous administration, it's going to create the start of the next endless war in the Middle East. And, you know, if policymakers want to avoid that, they need to be addressing these problems from a pro-peace perspective, from a perspective that brings about justice, you know, political solutions based on democracy, on gender equality, on the equality of all communities in the region, all of these values that while imperfectly, the autonomous administration is really trying to fight for. Yeah, I think it's super important to point out that like this isn't a necessarily a like turkey versus

kurdish people like a dichotomy or like that's those aren't the only people impacted by this right like because like the i think the majority of the anes is not kurdish people right and i think the majority of the sdf also are not kurdish i mean there's a very good paper by dr amy austin holmes who wrote in an analysis of this conflict and the sort of Turkey SDF security dynamics that what we would refer to as the Turkish Kurdish conflict or the Turkey PKK conflict is actually a conflict that impacts every ethnic and religious group in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. And of course you have, and we could do an entire other episode on this, you know, there are certainly Kurds who support Erdogan and the AKP, whether from an Islamist

perspective or on the basis of class interests. And you have Turks, ethnic Turkish people, who went to Northeast Syria during the height of the fight against ISIS as members of socialist groups to provide humanitarian aid and to join Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS on the ground. You have Yazidis, Christians, Syriacs, Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs, all different ethnic groups in Iraq and Syria that are very much impacted by this conflict. And particularly because of the Autonomous Administration's multi-ethnic and multi-religious model. And while the Autonomous Administration system certainly has its shortcomings and hasn't been able to perfectly overcome years and years of sectarian and religious and ethnic challenges, it has made a real attempt at including all of the peoples of the region.

And that's one of the reasons why, despite all of these Turkish attacks, despite the threat of ISIS, these communities have continued to band together and participate in SDF and autonomous administration structures in order to try to build governance and real post-ISIS security. So it's certainly not just a very narrowly defined Turkish Kurdish issue. It's an issue of civil rights, of political rights, of long-term security and stability, of what kind of society and what kind of governance can and should exist in this region, where many Kurds and many other ethnic and religious minorities would argue the European imposition of artificial borders and nation states onto areas that were multi-ethnic and multi-religious for thousands and thousands of years was the source of a lot of these problems

that we see today, not only with ISIS, not only with the Syrian war, with the Kurdish conflict in Turkey as well, with many of the issues that we're seeing in Iraq, in Iran, all over the region. So it goes much deeper than that. And I think that understanding, you know, the very deep historical roots of these issues is what can start to point us to the actual very radical solutions that would be necessary to get long term peace and security. Yeah, and that those aren't, I think, solutions, like you say, many nation states still exercising kind of pseudo-colonial control over these places or trying to or trying to at least sort of use force to extract wealth are really open to and so it creates this sort of half-assed like you've said this sort of limited support for only some parts of a project which

it doesn't work if you only support part of this project, right? As we're seeing. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's

lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura Podcast Network. Available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I wonder if people are interested in following more about this, I think it's something that

so much of the coverage of this whole area focuses on specifically women in our whole right or women who went to join ISIS where can people find out more about like the what sources would you suggest for following goings-on in this area so yeah I would say following local Syrian and Kurdish news sources would be a good place to start you You have sites like North Press, where I've written before that provide good perspectives from Syrian Kurdish writers. You have human rights organizations working on the ground, groups like Syrians for Truth and Justice that's done a lot of documentation

of issues like, for example, ISIS members who've joined Turkey-backed groups in the occupied areas. You have arguably one of the best English language resources, not only for their own publications, but for researchers and journalists to reach out to. The Rojava Information Center, it does a lot of good work on their own, and also a lot of really incredible work to facilitate the work of international researchers and journalists. You have the Kurdish media sites like Hawar News that will give good updates on what the Autonomous Administration is doing

and saying from their perspective. Of course, there are a lot of official pages and sites for Autonomous Administration and SDF institutions as well. Those tend to be in Kurdish or Arabic. So of course, if you know either of those languages, you can follow them. For English, you have some of the SDF affiliated sites that have been translated. The YPJ

Information and Documentation Office have done a lot of work on this issue of ISIS and the related security challenges. They publish in English. They provide good information from that security perspective. And then really, I think any sources on social media online that provide good perspectives from people who are on the ground, who are providing reputable information, whether it's from a human rights side of things, from the security side of things, from the administration side of things, it's good to get that full spectrum of perspectives of what different actors are doing and seeing. And then, of course, I'd be remiss if I did not promote my own institution. We have published coverage of certainly the ISIS issue in northeast Syria,

but also a lot on the wider political, humanitarian and security challenges related to these interlocking conflicts in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, that have sort of formed the very unstable basis on which these developments relevant to global security issues like ISIS are taking place. So you can certainly read what we've been publishing. Yeah, I think that's an excellent list of resources. And lots of the ones I've been using are the ones that you've mentioned. I would just, I suppose, warn people, especially the latest YPJ information and documentation center video on a whole, like comes with a heavy content warning for uh like violence um that you will

see there which is it's documenting things that happen it's not like they are doing the violence they're not but uh still if that's something you don't want to see that's probably a video you don't want to watch um megan is there anything people can do to help like this i was thinking when we were talking of like i met a Kurdish man a month ago at the border, being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But it's not a topic that gets much coverage in the US. And as a result, people both there and people coming here don't get the compassion that, let's say, Ukrainian people who are also fleeing conflict do get.

And you can see that in the way that they're literally treated differently in immigration law. So is there anything people can do to help? Well, I would say that the first thing is exactly like we're doing now on this discussion and like you as a listener listening to this conversation are doing by hearing from us and following this issue, encourage media, research, human rights groups, analysts, and all others who do work in any of these fields to cover this issue in its full political and security context. Look, we can't only talk about North and East Syria when there's a crisis. ISIS did not come out of nowhere in 2014. The Turkish invasion did not come out of nowhere in 2014. The Turkish invasion did not come out of

nowhere in 2019. And had we as a society and certainly our institutions been more informed and more aware of the root conditions causing these outbursts of violence, these outbursts of violence may not have happened. They might have been addressed before they happened. And so what does it mean to build that awareness? That means everything from writing a letter to your local newspaper, to producing a report at your university with input from institutions in northeast Syria, some of these local media and human rights organizations that we've talked about, to hosting an event for your community group on the state of this broadly defined conflict in Turkey and Iraq and Syria and Kurdistan between the Turkish state and these Kurdish groups that, in addition to fighting against ISIS,

have been struggling for autonomy, self-determination, equality between men and women, equality of people of different religious beliefs of different ethnic backgrounds, long before ISIS was on the agenda and Northeast Syria was on the agenda. We at the Kurdish Peace Institute are always available to help you do this. You can reach out to us on our contact page. We have information on everything from submitting content of your own to resources for reaching out to us for media appearances. Of course, there's all the sources I mentioned as well. And there are other episodes of this wonderful podcast with very talented expert speakers and interviewers as well who've spoken about issues related to Syria, Turkey, and Kurdistan. You can advocate for greater political support for the autonomous

administration, for an end to Turkey's aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and its ongoing human rights violations in the occupied areas of Afrin and Ras Al Ain, and for international political support for a democratic, just, peaceful solution to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. This is, I think at the end of the day, the root of all of these problems that we're seeing here. And if this conflict were to be resolved, that we're seeing here. And if this conflict were to be resolved, if Turkey were no longer to take an aggressive militaristic approach to the very concept of Kurdish autonomy, the very social base of Kurdish communities that has the capacity to seek and organize for autonomy itself, this would mean an end to authoritarianism in Turkey, which has been leading Turkey to all

sorts of destabilizing behavior and certainly immiserating countless Turkish citizens. This is one of the reasons why not only Kurds, but many Turkish people of all ethnicities as well have been fleeing Turkey to Europe and even to the United States, has been the escalating persecution, poverty, and difficulty of life under Erdogan, which is directly connected to Erdogan's choice in 2015 to end peace talks with the Kurdish movement in order to consolidate his total power over the state using war and far-right nationalism. This would end not only these difficult conditions within Turkey, this persecution, this economic devastation,

this oppression of all oppressed segments of society, it would end Turkey's aggressive foreign policy in the region as well, which would be hugely important for allowing Northeast Syria the stability it needs to put ISIS members on trial, hold them accountable for what they've done, begin to rebuild, give post-ISIS communities a future, allow these people who have suffered so much to defeat this group, of course for themselves, but really for all humanity, to be able to build new lives, recover, and have a say in their future. And by doing that, to pursue a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Right now, Northeast Syria is the only major part of Syria outside of government control that has a system that is semi-functional

despite all of the setbacks of the war and the economic crisis, which again could be a whole other episode, which has empowered women, you know, which has empowered different ethnic and religious communities. They could be part of a political solution in Syria. Turkey's war on the Kurdish movement, you know, is preventing that. This goes into a lot of challenges in Iraq as well with increasing Turkish military operations there related to the conflict that have made life extremely difficult for many different Iraqi communities. But again, all of this, this conflict, you could argue, is the largest and most impactful and certainly one of the longest running, you know, for 40 years now of the modern Middle East. It is an international conflict. The United States, European governments, like we saw with the example of the U.S. and European position on NATO

accession and the concessions to Turkey made there, have been very involved in supporting militarily and politically Turkey's efforts to resolve this conflict militarily and to deny the Kurdish people their rights by force. And we, you listening to this, our communities in all of these different countries that have a stake in this conflict, we're the ones who can change that. And you can do that on two different tracks. So one, you can build awareness in your own community. You can build connections between your community groups and institutions in Northeast Syria, in Turkey, in different places impacted by this conflict in order to find ways that you can help respond to specific needs, work on specific

projects together. And two, in the long run, use those connections, your knowledge you gain from those connections, the resources you create as you reach out to the media, as you meet different people working on this, to reach out to decision makers and show this is an issue that their constituents care about. This is an issue that's not something that governments can do without a response from public opinion. And this is an issue where there is organized pressure to change policy, you know, in favor of peace, in favor of stability, in favor of political solutions. Because when we do that, and there's lots of examples of how different communities and organizations have done that, when we do that on a large enough scale, we're not only addressing

a humanitarian problem, we're not only contributing to peace and stability in the region, but at the end of the day, we can find solutions for these conflicts that mean that there won't be another rise of ISIS. There won't be another Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Syria. And there will be models for political and social transformation that can help us end conflicts in other parts of the world as well. So there's lots of ways to contribute. I hope you're inspired to do so. And I think that just listening to this conversation, hearing about what's going on and thinking about what you can do,

that's already the first step. You're already there. And that's the most important thing. Yeah, great. Thanks, Megan. That's a really good, I think, place to end because it gives some people something to do. I think far too often, like it's really easy and immediate to just point at something and say it's bad and then walk away and not sort of leave people a way to help or do something.

So I really appreciate you doing that. Is there anywhere people can find you on the Internet? So you can find all of my research and writing at Kurdishpeace.org, as well as all of the research and writing of our brilliant contributors, many of whom are on the ground in northern Syria themselves, in other parts of the region, or who have extensively traveled to that region for their work. I encourage you to read all of our content and to follow our social media pages as well at Kurdishpeace.Org on Twitter. And yes, you can read not only my work, but the work of a lot of other really great people that I'm very lucky to collaborate with. Amazing. Thanks so much for your time, Megan. Thank you, James.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

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