It Could Happen Here - Turkey’s Bombing Iraqi Kurdistan

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

James explains the significance of the ongoing Turkish bombing campaign against southern  Kurdistan and what this means for the Kurdish freedom movement as well civilians in the region.  https://www.kurdishpeace.org/research/human-rights/the-kurdish-refugees-at-the-southern-border/  https://cptik.org/reports-1/2024/8/12/civilian-casualties-by-turkish-and-iranian-military-operations-1991-2024 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off

our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, indeed the last few months, the eyes of the world have been on the atrocities inflicted on the people of Palestine on a daily basis. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to lift their voices for the stateless nation of Palestine, and against Israel's unchecked mass murder of civilians. It's something I never thought I would see in the US. On one of my first visits here, I was staying

at a bed and breakfast in the Bronx in late December. It was cold, and I was wearing a kefir to stay warm, as I still often do. I remember wearing it while I was talking to small guys while I was waiting for the train, and we talked about Palestine for a long time. I ended up giving one of them my kefir, and he gave me some cool badges I still have on a jacket somewhere. I was hopeful after that. But since then, I've lived here for more than a decade. It was really not for about 15 years that I saw someone else in the US without a direct connection to Palestine who wanted to show up for the Palestinians. It's an important cause and it's one that we've been supporting

here on our podcast with our coverage and speaking for myself also with my presence when I can. But as the world looked at Gaza, bombs also fell on Kurdistan. It's equally hard, if not harder, to find solidarity for the Kurdish freedom movement in the United States. I have a Kurdish kefir as well. A Kurdish migrant that I met in the mountains gave it to me on one cold night last year after I said good evening to him in Comanche. It stinks of campfires and cigarettes and I wear it all the time. I don't think anyone has ever recognised it, let alone said anything positive about it. But someone did once ask me if it was a Rast thing. let alone said anything positive about it.

But someone did once ask me if it was a Rast thing. So while our eyes have been on Gaza, those of Turkish drones and warplanes have been on the mountains of southern Kurdistan. Bombs have been going off in Kurdistan for a very long time. Indeed, before Guernica, Britain was dropping bombs on people in the Middle East without paintings to commemorate it. State boundaries and alliances have changed a lot since those first bombs, as has technology, but the fact that death from above has remained a consistent tool of the colonial state hasn't changed. When I was in Kurdistan in October of

2023, it was amidst almost constant drone strikes. I had to conduct my interviews in a climate of secrecy and concern, somewhat for my own safety, but also for the safety of my interviewees, who took great and serious personal risks to come and meet me. One of the people I met was Zagros Hiva, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Communities Union, or in Kurdish, Korma Sivakin Kurdistani. It's generally known as the KCK by its Kurdish initials. Recently I connected with Zagros again and I asked him to explain this latest round of aggression. Hello dear James, I hope you are doing well. As far as your first question is concerned,

I can say that this operation has started from 16th of April, six days before Erdogan's visit to Baghdad. And in the last weeks, the Turkish army has extended these operations and this invading army has moved further deep into the Iraqi territory and the Kurdistan region. Now they have set up checkpoints. They stop civilians. They interrogate them. According to CPT report,

CPT stands for Community Peacemaking Teams. It is a civil society organization active in Iraq and Kurdistan region of Iraq. civil society organization active in Iraq and Kurdistan region of Iraq. According to CPT report in the last months there has been 238 bombardments in those areas and 2000 hectares of agricultural land have been burned to ashes.

And now 602 villages are under the threat of displacement, and 162 of them have already been displaced. They have been razed to earth. From the start of this year, according to CPT data, 1,700 attacks have been done. And this comes against the backdrop of attacks in 2023 where 1,548 bombardments have taken place. 548 bombardments have taken place. If you're not familiar with the KCK on whose behalf Zagros is speaking, you can think of it as the umbrella group that unites the various Kurdish freedom movements in Bakur, North, Bashur or South, Rojava or West, and Rojelat or East, to use the Kurdish

terms. These parts of the Kurdish homeland are found in different states. Respectively, they are in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In each of these states, Kurdish people represent a minority. Under the Assad regime in Syria, Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and forced out of their homes in what is known as the Arab Belt Program. In Turkey, they had been bombed, banned from speaking their language, and even had their very existence denied by the state. In Iran, tens of thousands of Kurds were killed when they rose up for autonomy in 1979, and they still cannot teach their children in their own language. In Iraq, they were subjected to genocidal violence, chemical weapons, and the murder and forced Arabization of tens of thousands of Kurds during what is known as the Anfal. If you ever find yourself in Sulaymaniyah, or Sulaymaniyah as it's known in

Kurdish, you can visit the incredible museum there which documents the tortured history of the Kurdish people at the hands of the Iraqi state. It's a very moving place. On entering the museum, you'll walk through a hallway that's covered from floor to ceiling with broken pieces of mirrors. Each represents a life cut short during the Anfal. After this entrance, the first exhibit you'll see has a large sign that says, In those days, we had no friends but the mountains. It's an old and sometimes overused aphorism about the Kurds, but it's not untrue. old and sometimes overused aphorism about the Kurds, but it's not untrue. In the mountains of southern Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement aims to liberate the Kurdish people from all four

states, and indeed from the state altogether. And it's in these mountains it's found a place where it could avoid state violence. The mountains of Kurdistan have long provided a safe place, and especially in recent years, the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, controlled by Bafed Talibani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which shares power in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, headed by Masoud Barzani. The Kurdish freedom movement, that is the KCK, has been able to exist largely without the state. This, of course, has always been unpopular in Ankara, and indeed in Baghdad. A recent offensive by Turkey seeked not only to displace the PKK, that's the Kurdistan

Workers' Party, which is part of the KCK, and its allies from the mountains, but also to extend their state control there. Now, I could go on for a diversion about James C. Scott here, but that's another episode that I'm working on, so I'll spare you. Instead, I asked Mohamed Havasila, a Kurdish historian, to explain the impact of this latest round of aggression and how local people felt about it. People here in Sulaymaniyah

or in the PKK-controlled area, or even in Kudusan,, our sympathy with PKK, our sympathy with Rojava, with the Abaqa, our sympathy, so they see that they are really struggle against an enemy went to invade the whole Kyrgyzstan, went to move the whole Kyrgyzstan, want to burn the whole Kurdistan, went to move the whole Kurdistan, want to burn the whole Kurdistan. In my point of view, it's not that the case of PKK of Rojava. And they have the same issue, the same stand with Rojava, with YPK, with the Syrian part of Kurdistan. So, people here, especially in Ghernyan, not the PQ control,

I think the whole folks are proud with the struggle of Rojava, with the struggle of YPG, and they did very hard issue for their people and they have actually very concrete program for the future. Turkey however seeing the existence of the movement as a threat to its national security has begun a campaign to eliminate the movement wherever it finds it. As Mohamed mentioned, the history of the Kurdish people in Turkey is one that's riddled with state violence, and it's that which I want to discuss today. Turkey has long vacillated between a genocidal denial of the existence of Kurdish people, recognising that they exist only insofar as it allows them to be targets for bombing. We could really start this history almost anywhere in the 20th century. Indeed, following a series of suppressed rebellions,

the entirety of northern Kurdistan was closed military area in which Turkey did not allow foreigners from 1925 to 1965. But I want to start it just after a coup in 1980 when Abdullah Ocalan had recently founded the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party and was beginning to view a vision of Kurdish liberation that was rooted in a Marxist-Leninist and socialist analysis and ideas of national liberation. Soon after the 1980 coup, Turkey began to refer to the Kurds as mountain Turks and although it doesn't do this as much anymore, it did recently release school books in Diyarbarbekir a majority kurdish region that made no reference to the kurds or their language and asserted that people there

spoke a dialect of turkish they don't they speak kurdish it's this denial of their very existence zagros told me that made the kurdish freedom guerrillas take up arms in 1984 which is actually 40 years ago yesterday if you're listening to this on the day it comes out. But after the military coup of 1980 and the inhumane tortures in the notorious prison of Diyarbakir, Ahmed City, the movement embarked on a strategy of legitimate self-defense and waged military struggle against the Turkish state, starting from 15th of August 1984. Since then, there have been periods of ceasefire and periods of conflict, with tens of thousands of lives lost. Both sides have killed civilians as part of their attacks on the other. The most recent ceasefire was signed in 2013, and as a result, the PKK began slowly withdrawing to the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

In 2015, when the Syrian Kurdish YPG and YPJ fighters were leading the battle against ISIS, Turkey broke the ceasefire between the PKK and itself, began attacking the Kurdish fighters, forcing them into a war on two fronts. As far as Turkey is concerned, the YPG, YPJ, KCK, YBS in Yazidi areas and all other elements of the Kurdistan freedom movement are just different names for the PKK, which it considers to be a terrorist organization. Everyday life for Kurdish people in Turkey can be hard. I've spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of them in the last year, often sitting around fires in the mountains, working together to build wooden shelters for their children, or sharing the bowls of beans that my friends cooked because the state refused to feed the people it was detaining in the open

air for days. These aren't conversations I recorded because that wouldn't be safe. There's a very real danger of these folks not getting asylum and being sent back to a country where they've seen their friends murdered, their election results denied, their job applications thrown away and their language suppressed. Having them on the record would be a huge risk to their safety. And not every interaction I have with people, even people I'm writing about, has to be turned into content to go between the adverts. So sometimes I just do things because I like to do them. If you'd like to know more about these stories, you can find a link to a piece I wrote

for the Kurdish Peace Institute in the show notes. Anyway, here's an ad break. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, We'll see you next time. This is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything, from music and pop culture,

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, El Te Caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio 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 Tex'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. 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.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The situation in Iraq is different. The Kurdistan Autonomous Region enjoys a great degree of autonomy from Baghdad. It's chiefly run by two parties, the KDP and the PUK. The KDP enjoys influence in Erbil or Haululer in Kurdish. In Slimani, the PUK is in control. In these areas, especially those of the KDP, a more neoliberal vision of

Kurdish identity is pursued. In Hauler, I saw skyscrapers lit up all night, huge mansions, but also whole areas of the city struggling to get by, or sometimes not even having access around water. The vision of Kurdish identity here is not as threatening to Turkey, and the KDP seems to take the line that the PKK ought to keep its struggle within the Turkish borders. The PUK has been more sympathetic to the KCK and the PKK, and it's often in the mountains near Slimani and Duhok that Turkey targets Kurdish guerrillas and their infrastructure. For the last 40 years, Turkey has remained extremely hostile to the vision of Kurdish liberation with the democratic and federal system that Ocalan and the movement that follows him have adopted.

I asked Zagros to explain the connection between the Kurdish struggle in north and east Syria, which many listeners will probably be familiar with, and the element of the Kurdish freedom movement in other parts of Kurdistan, which they might not be familiar with. In our last interview, I spoke to Zagorosa about history in Spain. Now it was his turn to give me a history lesson. By the way, he calls Ozilan Lida Apo here, Rehber Apo in Kurdish. It's a common contraction that's used all over Kurdistan

and Apo is also the vocative form of the Comanji word for a paternal uncle. Lida Apo migrated to the Middle East. He migrated to Syria and Lebanon, I mean, months before the military coup in Turkey, the military coup of 1980. He went there on his own. There was only one comrade with him. First, he entered the city of Kobani, and from there he found his way to Lebanon, to Beirut. In Lebanon, he made relations with the Palestinian groups. He even took part in the resistance of the Palestinian groups against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

For nearly 20 years, he waged the freedom struggle from Lebanon and Syria. In doing so, he educated, he trained and organized the Kurdish people in Rojava, Kurdistan. In this sense, his struggle is twofold. In this sense, his struggle is twofold. Firstly, he developed self-awareness in the people of Rojava with regard to their national and cultural identity and brought the Rojava people together, who had been divided by the many Arab builds and demographic change operations of the Baath regime. demographic change operations of the Baath regime. All these organizational activities were done despite the Syrian regime and he managed to run a delicate balance to foil the repressive measures of the Syrian regime there. I'll just interject here to explain these terms.

Baathist Syria under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashir al-Assad attempted to divide and deny the existence of the Kurdish people in many ways. Some of these included omitting them from censuses, denying them citizenship, prohibiting the public use of their language and demographic transfers and installed belts of Arab people in areas that were majority Kurdish. Nonetheless, Assad also saw benefit allowing the PKK to exist within his borders, especially in the parts of Lebanon that Syria occupied, in order to use them as a tool against other states.

Secondly, he got this nationally and culturally aware people of Rojava to support the struggle in North Kurdistan. Therefore, thousands of Rojava youth were first organized and educated in villages, in cities, and then they joined the guerrilla struggle and fought in North Kurdistan, in Bakur, Kurdistan. This struggle served to unite Rojava and North Kurdistan, Bakur Kurdistan, and develop shared national political awareness and attitudes. Thousands of Rojava youth, boys and girls, fell martyr in the ranks of the guerrilla struggle. martyr in the ranks of the guerrilla struggle. Lider Apo tried to reach out to all cities, to all villages, to all families,

and even to all individuals in Rojava, Kurdistan. This has created a strong national, social, cultural, and let's say philosophical bond between Lider Apo and the Rojava people. Because neglected and divided people had united around him. This isn't an episode about the entire history of the PKK, and I wouldn't be the person to write that. But I will attempt to speedrun it here anyway. Appa was arrested in Nairobi in 1999. Ever since then, he's been held in prison,

often without access to visitors or his lawyers, and at some points on an island where he was a solitary prisoner, surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of guards. His human rights are almost universally acknowledged to have been violated by this arrangement, and despite a quarter century of detention and Turkish moves towards Europe, there seems to be no willingness on the part of the Turkish state to release him. In his time in jail, he began to read more and correspond with many thinkers, including Murray Bookchin. Bookchin influenced his thinking a great deal. And gradually, through this and other influences, Oslo moved away from a Marxist-Leninist analysis and national liberation goals, and instead began to conceive of a feminist and ecological revolution that decentralized power, ensured all authority positions were shared by a man and a woman, and valued the environment as much or more than the

economy. This libertarian left ideology came to be known as democratic confederalism, and it is a guiding ethos for Rojava, and indeed the KCK as a whole. The civil war in Syria provided an opening that the Kurdistan Freedom Movement took advantage of, as Assad's forces withdrew from their regions to fight elsewhere. They didn't spring from the ground in 2011, but instead they'd spent decades building a movement that they felt could replace the state. Today, millions of people live, work and play under a democratic confederate ideology in the autonomous area of north and east Syria where I was last year.

It's not paradise, but it's a special place and by any metric life there is better than in the rest of syria right now for over a decade they've navigated a complex system of adversaries including the syrian state the islamic state and the turkish state just this week all three of them have tried to attack rajava more than 15 000 men and women, have died in the decade-long war against the Islamic State, which, contrary to much reporting, remains ongoing. ISIS actually car-bombed a place not far from where I stayed last October, after I'd come home. At times, the USA has supported the people of Rojava in their battle against the Islamic State, but it's also stood by as Turkish bombs fell on them.

Although Rojava is by far the biggest territorial area in which democratic confederalism is in practice, much of the movement remains in the mountains of southern Kurdistan, in what is technically Iraqi territory. There are many more Kurdish people in Turkey, and as the recent election results show, revolution by the ballot box is not really an option for them. Rojava enjoys autonomy, but it is still very much ideologically twinned with the part of the movement that remains in the mountains and dedicated to its struggle against the Turkish state. Turkey, in return, has crossed the border with Iraq to attack the KCK, and anyone

else who gets caught in the crossfire. As Zagros explained, this is not new, but the recent change has been notable. to the other side of the border, into the Iraqi border, for several months, to withdraw back to the other side of the border, to its own border, afterwards, after several months. And in that period, it only had a limited number of barracks and bases on the Iraqi territory. The change now is that Te Taki has built new military roads from scratch to the Kurdistan region, to northern Iraq. It has built more than 100 big and small military bases and barracks in the area

and has no intention to withdraw. As I said, the ultimate goal is to annex all these lands to the Turkish territory. Today, Turkish troops can be found deep inside Iraq. According to the community peacemaker teams, since December of 2017, Turkish forces have built over 40 bases anywhere from 9 to 25 kilometers into Iraqi Kurdistan's territory south of its border. They have dispatched hundreds of troops and military vehicles into another state, set up checkpoints, and even killed civilians, a member of the KIG's military, the Peshmerga. Fighting has caused massive wildfires. For example, in Sagale village, about 55% of the agricultural land has been burned by Turkish attacks. Incidentally, Turkish shelling in the

autonomous area of north and east Syria has also caused similar fires and destruction of crops in agricultural areas. The Kurdish freedom movement is very well established in the mountains of southern Kurdistan, where they live in tunnels and caves. These are not caves or tunnels like you played in as a little child. We're talking about villages underground. This makes tracking them very hard. As we heard in another episode, many of the fighters sent to Kurdistan are Syrian Arabs, repurposed by Turkey and ginned up on anti-Kurdish sentiment.

But this is perhaps the least concerning of the ways that the tunnels are being attacked. Zagros explained some of the other things that they've seen. The idea is that they use dogs. They tie explosives to the dogs and send the dogs into the tunnels. And they explode the dogs via remote control. In addition to the dogs, he says that the Turkish state uses chemical weapons inside the tunnels. There are also reports of suicide

bombers detonating themselves. The KCK also claims that Turkey uses thermobaric bombs, sometimes called bunker busters, which create a huge pressure wave and subsequent vacuum. Also, they are using thermobaric bombs. We have documented the use of these thermobaric

bombs. There are remnants of these bombs. They are using thermobaric bombs. There are remnants of these bombs. They are using thermobaric or vacuum bombs against the tunnels. And they are using some form of explosives which are more powerful than thermobaric bombs. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas have developed a literature for it because they do not know what kind of explosive it is, but it has the effect of a nuclear bomb. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas call it a nuclear bomb. They call it so because the effects are higher than the thermobaric bombs.

I asked Mohamed to explain how people are reacting to the current situation. You know, Turkey now invaded some parts of Pakistan and actually the areas under the control or under the influence of KRG state, of KDP. And, you know, the people here have dislikes, this issue dislikes the invasion of Turkey to this area. It's not just invasion, it's killing people, besides the PKK elements, and killing people and burning the whole agricultural area, and you know, so on, so on. So it's kind of an invasion. But here, some people and forces in the southern part of Kurdistan, or southern Kurdistan, you know, Iraqi Kurdistan,

like their sympathy with the PKK. They have sympathy with PKK as they see that they're alive. So they're struggling against Turkey because if there is no PKK, even if there is no PKK, the Turkish forces will not withdraw from Komsomol. When it controls any area of Iraqi Komsomol, let's say, or southern Komsomol, it will not withdraw. And its excuse is PKK. But things on earth is telling something else. it will not withdraw. And it's an excuse to speak a cave. But things on earth are telling something else.

Despite what both my guests have seen as alienation of the local population, Turkey is continuing with its attacks. I asked Zagros what he thought the goals of this Turkish invasion of Iraq were. The invasion and annexation of these lands is the prime goal of Turkey. This goal is a long-term goal of the Turkish state since it has been created after the Lausanne Agreement. It has two aspects. Firstly, Turkey lays claim to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire

100 years ago. It lays claims to cities like Mosul and Kirkuk and claims that these are lands of Turkey. So, the invasion operation in the area of Bahrain ends up in Matinah and Abashin, in the areas in the area of Bahdina, in Zab, in Matina, in Abashin,

in the areas around the cities of Ahmediyah, Deir el-Luk, Shiladze and Duhuk, they are attempts to take control of these mountainous areas and to materialize those long-range goals. Turkey already has a big military base near Mosul, I think 15 to 20 kilometers north of Mosul. It is called the Başik base. So if Turkey manages to invade all these areas in Bahadir, I mean in cities of the Huk, mountainous areas of the Huk,

I mean in cities of the Huk, mountainous areas of the Huk, Turkey will be able to create a land bridge between these areas and its base in Mosul, and it will be far easier for Turkey to, let's say, annex the city of Mosul and Kirkuk to its lands. Secondly, Turkey has a long-term goal of demographic change in Kurdistan. As you know, Kurdistan is a land, the ancestral land

of the Kurds, being divided between four countries, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, being divided by borders. People from one side of the border are Kurdish, people on the other side of the border are Kurdish. In many cases, the borderline go through the cities. They divide the cities. They have divided the villages. They have divided the tribes. They have divided large populations. They have even divided families. This is one of the characteristics of the characteristics

of the border in Kurdistan. In fact, Turkey has begun something of an Arab belt program of its own in Syria, seeking to resettle Syrian refugees and Turkish-backed Syrian anti-government rebels in the areas that it took from Mujavah in military operations over the last eight years. This is part of Turkey's plan to return as many as a million Syrian migrants to a country still in the grips of a brutal civil war, and push the autonomous administration of north and east Syria back from Turkish borders, or crush it altogether. For Turkey, there's no distinction between Rojava and the PKK, and thus Turkey claims the entirety of Rojava is a haven for terrorism. entirety of Rojava is a haven for terrorism. Many Kurdish fighters and international volunteers who fought ISIS for years died fighting the Turkish army in Afrin and the many other territories that Turkey has expanded into since 2017. The fighting there was fierce and saw the

YPG and the YPJ, the men's and women's armed forces of Rojava, battling a NATO army with modern armor and modern air power. After taking significant losses, they retreated. And I asked Zagros what this means for people living in Afrin, who had just managed to return to some semblance of normalcy after Assad's forces left and attacks from the al-Nusra front became less frequent. This is genocide. I mean, forcing people to leave their lands and replacing those people with people which are not from that land. Forcing people to leave their ancestral lands, lands which they have lived on for thousands of years, for more than 10,000 years.

And getting Arab jihadists, Chechen jihadists to live in those areas, it is a genocide. Arab jihadists, Chechen jihadists, to live in those areas, it is a genocide. Along with the ecocide which is now taking place. Thousands of hectares of forests, of agricultural land are now burning. So what Turkey does is femicide, is ecocide, is genocide in Kurdistan. And this, let's say, what now happens to the Kurds. Is the same thing that happened to the Armenians. 1000 years ago. The genocide of the Armenians. Was done by the people.

Who had the same mentality. And the same mindset of. Erdogan I can say. So these areas are very strategic. For the Kurds. They bind the four parts of Kurdistan together demographically and now Erdogan wants to

draw a jihadist buffer zone between these areas. If a Kurd from Syria wants to go to the Kurdistan under the invasion of Turkey, we call it North Kurdistan, he will have to go to the Kurdistan under the invasion of Turkey, we call it North Kurdistan,

he will have to go through cities and areas populated by Arab jihadists, by Chechen jihadists, by Turkmen jihadists, by jihadists which have been collected from around the world. This buffer zone

which is more than 1,000 kilometers long, according to Erdogan's plan, and 30 to 40 kilometers wide, is expected to be inhabited, to be settled by the jihadists which Erdogan has gathered from ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra members, ex-Al-Qaeda. ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra members, ex-Al-Qaeda. 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 Thank you. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get yourifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs

and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

At present, this Turkish occupation is a situation in parts of Syria. But it's also increasingly becoming likely that it will be the situation in parts of Iraq. As is often the case, states are trying to use divisions in Kurdistan to their advantage, and Turkey in particular is relying on the well-worn excuse of counter-terrorism to mount its incursions deep into Iraq. Here's Mohamed explaining that. to support maybe PKK, they don't say orally that thing, and KDP say that follow the instruction

of Turkey, and actually here the force and influence of Turkey, and even Iran in the beauty-controlled area is very strong, and people here, as people of the nation, are not feeling comfort with such invasion, such issues. So we are not like the owner of our right decision in the area. So, we are divided between Iran and Turkey and so and so, and we are not depending on our people. You know, thousands of people killed for the nationalist, you know, hopes.

And now people are frustrated with such issues, with such situations. Mohamed also said that it was really frustrating for him to see Kurdish politicians so influenced by the states that they've been trying to escape for a century. So we are here in a situation from the North Turkey, from the East Iran, from the South Iraq, and all are they working. the southern laws of the people, why you are not depending on your will or the force of your people, why you became like a feather,

a feather to the winds of so forth, which are not your, they are not your friend. Even in the east and the north and the south, they are not your friend. But if you depend on your own people, on your own

struggle hard, and we have, you know, we have the legacy of this issue, we have the legacy of this issue. We have the legacy of the struggle in this area from 1960s. Indeed, the invasion of southern Kurdistan would not be possible without the consent of both the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional authorities. As Zagros mentioned, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Baghdad on April 22.

This was his first visit to Iraq since 2011. During the visit, Iraq and Turkey signed a joint security agreement, allowing Turkey to conduct military operations deep within Iraqi territory. In return, Iraq will receive desperately needed water from Turkey. And now in those areas, tens of thousands of Turkish troops, hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, drones, radars have been deployed to the area. They are active every day. And they are invading northern Iraq at a time when the border guards of Iraq, Iraqi army border guards, are standing by and just watching.

As you may know, as the result of the agreement between the Iraqi state and Turkish state, Iraqi border guard forces, let's say, they were decided to be sent to the Iraqi-Turkish border. But now these border guards are not on the Turkish-Iraqi border, the border that we know. These border guards have been deployed 40 kilometers, 30 kilometers deep into the Iraqi territory. They don't go to the border. They are guarding the invading Turkish army. For the people of the region, this means yet more trauma and more displacement. There are already more than 1 million displaced people in southern kurdistan as some of them are living in pretty terrible

conditions i've seen those refugee camps when i was there last october but these operations have created more here's just one anecdote of displacement shared by cpt on their website we met a man named kak bashir who had tried to build a cafe here. His dreams of a cafe had been shattered by Turkish artillery and small arms fire coming from the Turkish base on the hillside nearby. He was originally from Sigire village, but had been displaced to Gani village by the Turkish military five years ago. Due to the loss of his farm in Sigire, he has planted some vegetables next to the site of his cafe. He gave each CPT member some sweet basil and invited us to his village. When we arrived, a man dressed in immaculate traditional Kurdish clothes stood transfixed, staring into the valley. He was staring at Mize village, his home. Mize is one of at least nine villages displaced by

the recent Turkish operation. Kak Basir told us that displaced people from the valley would visit this place daily to gaze upon their cut-off towns and farmland below. Despite months of shelling and bombing, the military strongholds of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement remain intact, and the more obvious damage has been done to civilians rather than military targets. The HPG, which is the fighting arm of the BKK, has been able to obtain loitering anti-aircraft munitions, shot down several drones, but it's still unable to shoot down fighter jets like the US-provided F-16s that are currently bombing them. For civilians, without mountain caves or tunnels to hide in, the impact is severe, and people who have faced oppression and persecution from Saddam Hussein, ISIS, numerous other states and groups, are now once again being displaced.

I want to finish up with the end of Zagros' message to me, in which he made a comparison with Palestine like I did at the start. On the day I first interviewed Zagros, bombs made in the US had just been falling from Israeli planes onto civilians in Palestine again. And we discussed the fact that all the solutions being discussed hinged around the need for states, one state or two states, to solve the problem. But this was a problem created by states, and it was states sending bombs to another state to drop on children, both in Kurdistan and in Palestine. It was a problem. Here's Zagros' reflection on nearly 10 months of bombing in Palestine and Kurdistan. And I just want to explain here that

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was at one point the leader of ISIS. He's dead now. And when he says Daesh, he's referring to the former so-called Islamic State. The struggle that is now waged in the mountains of Kurdistan against the invading Turkish army. It is a continuation of the struggle against Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Because ideologically there is no difference between Erdogan and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi first took Mosul and now Erdogan wants to invade Mosul too. Erdogan attacks all those places which have been hubs of resistance against Daesh. He attacks Sinjar, he attacks Kobani, he attacks Kandil Mountains, which are the home of those who inspired and organized the fight against Daesh on the ground.

Erdogan's army is Daesh in NATO uniforms, in NATO fatigues. In recent days, Erdogan accuses Netanyahu of committing genocide against the Palestinians. Netanyahu also accuses Erdogan of committing genocide against the Kurds. In fact, what these two men say against Ishad is to some extent right. Both of them have been commissioned by the forces of capitalist modernity to eliminate two people, to eliminate the Kurds and the Palestinians. What Netanyahu does against the Palestinians is exactly what Erdogan is doing against the Kurds. What is needed is to draw the attention of the world public opinion to the atrocities of Erdogan's regime

and the genocidal and ecocidal crimes he commits against the Kurdish people and their land, which is Kurdistan. The struggle in Palestine and Kurdistan are one struggle, the struggle of two people against genocide and extermination. The struggle of two people against genocide and extermination. Both struggles need support from the youth, from the women all around the world, from democratic forces, from intellectuals, students, unions, workers, from all people. People need to be united against Erdogan as they were united against Daesh, as they are now united against the genocidal attacks in Palestine. The Turkish regime can be protested everywhere

in many ways. Turkish goods and commodities can be boycotted because they are the source of funds for Erdogan's war machine, for Erdogan's genocidal army. Delegations can be formed and they can come to visit Kurdistan and see with their own eyes the extent of genocide and genocide in Kurdistan. Free journalists can shed more light on the atrocities of Erdogan in Kurdistan. Revolutionary youth, revolutionary people, men and women can come and join the struggle in the mountains of Kurdistan. Kurdistan is your home. 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast

for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.