Rev Left Radio - The Kurds and the Rojavan Revolution w/ Dr. Thoreau Redcrow

Episode Date: May 23, 2017

Brett sits down with Dr. Thoreau Redcrow, an expert on these issues, to discuss The Rojavan Revolution, the history of Kurdish repression in Turkey, and how the Kurds in Northern Syria (i.e. Western Kurdistan) are building socialism against all odds.  Dr. Redcrow is an American with a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis with a concentration in Global Conflict. He did his dissertation while embedded with the PKK in Kurdistan in 2014, coinciding with the emergence of ISIS. Follow Dr. Redcrow on FB: www.facebook.com/thoreau.redcrow Follow us on: Facebook Twitter @RevLeftRadio or contact the dudes at Revolutionary Left Radio via Email   Please take the time to rate and leave a review on iTunes! This will help expand our overall reach.   Thank You for your support and feedback!

We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn. We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. This is not my fault, and I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege.

When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house, that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People are engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and dedicated comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have a very special episode.

I'm extremely excited about this episode. We have Dr. Thoreau Redcrow on the show. Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit and say a bit about your background? Sure. A PhD in international conflict analysis with specialization in global conflict. My master's in the same field. My bachelor's is in economics and political science. Okay, so let's go ahead and start with some basic background questions.

Who are the Kurds? Where is Kurdistan? How should people that don't know a lot about this topic orient themselves to what we're going to talk about today? Sure. I mean, obviously, you know, this is a topic that we could spend, you know, 10 different, you know, 10 hours talking about, but sort of as a general overview, if I was describing who are the Kurds. I mean, they're the, you know, the common phrase that you always hear is the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. The numerically, you see different figures, anything from 35 to 40 to 45 millions. Some Kurdish scholars will tell you that it's much higher, 50, 60 million. And the reason why there's a discrepancy in their demographic numbers is because the states that have historically occupied the Kurds haven't allowed them to conduct a census to really tell how many Kurds there are.

But my research, I've come to the conclusion that Kurds number about 40 million in total. They're located across mainly four different countries, which comprise the area that I would call Greater Kurdistan. You have that broken in in the four regions. southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria, or along the entire northern border of Syria. The Kurds refer to these four regions by their Kurdish geographical name. So, for instance, northern Kurdistan and southeastern Turkey will be called Bakur, which is just the Kurdish word for north. Likewise, in northern Syria, they use the word rojava, which is a Kurdish word for west.

in northern Iraq, which is sometimes called Iraqi Kurdistan. You know, the Kurds see that is southern Kurdistan, and so they'll call that region Bashur, which is, you know, the word south in Kurdish. And then in northwestern Iran, which the Kurds see as eastern Kurdistan, they'll refer to that region as Rojolat, which is, you know, the word east or eastern in Kurdish. So sort of, that's kind of an overview of the geography of the 40 million Kurds that are spread across those four countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And so it's easy to see why they would be, you know, such a pivotal group, you know, at this

moment, you know, in the world because of their geographical location. Yeah, is there any differences between the geographical locations as far as the continuity of culture or ideas? Are there different governments in each area? Just kind of give us an outline of how they orient themselves. And because since they're all spread out between four different, you know, nation states, how that affects, you know, the way they operate in those areas. Yeah, because they are separated, you know, within these four nations,

that's why you also have a lot of differences culturally. So, for instance, linguistically, you have several different dialects of Kurdish. The primary one is called Kermangi, which uses a Latin script or the Latin alphabet. That's spoken in northern Kurdistan or southeastern Turkey. It's spoken in Rojava primarily as well. and in a few areas in Rojolad and in Bashar, but just in the north-western area of Bashur. You know, within Southeast Turkey, you also have a dialect of Kurdish called Zazaki. And so this is probably the third largest Kurdish dialect.

The first would be Khrmanji, which is the Latin alphabet. The second largest would actually be called Sorani, which uses an Arabic script. You know, and so they're writing from right to left. And so oftentimes people will see it and just think it's Arabic by, you know, the way that the calligraphy looks. This is primarily spoken in Rizalat, i.e. Iran, and in Bashur, i.e. Iraqi Kurdistan. And then you have the dialect of Zazaki, which is spoken in northern Kurdistan around the Dersim area. And, you know, the Turkish government sometimes tries to separate Zaza Kurds from other Kurds by saying, no, they're not Kurdish. there's Zaza based on that linguistic difference.

But if you look throughout the history, the Zaza Kurds and northern Kurdistan have actually probably been the most important ethnic element to Kurdish nationalism in that area. And so I would definitely put them, you know, firmly within the group of Kurds. But then you have other dialect as well, you know, Badini, Gorani, and Rosalazzo. It can be very complicated for an outsider who's, you know, studying the topic as well. You know, because when you say Kurds, it's, you know, it makes it seem like a, seems like a monolithic group. But linguistically, there's a lot of variation. Also, religiously, there's a lot of variation.

So, for instance, the majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslim, but you also have a good percentage of Kurds in Rojad, who are Shia Muslim. And then you have a good, you know, sizable percentage of Kurds who are Alevi in northern Kurdistan or in Turkey, especially near the Derseem area. And Aleviism is sort of a syncretic combination of several different faiths, Yazidiism, Azoresanism, some parts of Shia Islam, but it's sort of a spiritual mixture, and it focuses a lot on nature. And so the Alevies are oftentimes seen as non-Muslims to, you know, fundamentalist sects of Muslims in Turkey. But then you also have the Azidi or Yazidi people who most people in the world have heard of based on ISIS

trying to kill them all as apostates and the Yazedi people are located around Mount Sinjar in southern Kurdistan, i.e. northern Iraq. Yeah, could you tell us, I know that there was that incident a few years ago where I think ISIS had them cornered atop that mountain or it was something like that and there was pressure on the U.S. to try to save them can you give a little quick explanation about what happened in that event yeah ironically i was

actually in kirtistan at the time and i was actually in mount sinjar shortly after that occurred so i was able to interview a lot of the you know jazidi people who escaped mount sinjar following that i was able to go to six different azetti refugee camps in in rojava and in bashoer and interview you know hundreds of different azettis i was actually with a reporter from the New York Times at that time. And when I interviewed them, basically what had happened was in about August, you know, around August, 12, 13, somewhere in that time of 2014, you know, the, you know, group ISIS, or a lot of times the Kurds refer to them as Daesh, but for the purposes of this talk,

I'll just refer to them as ISIS, because most Americans probably know them as that. But, you know, ISIS began their, what I would call their Toyota Blitzkrieg, I guess. through parts of Syria and northern Iraq. We were just going village to village and taking them over very quickly. Well, because of the sort of Salafist or Wahhabist fundamentalist version of Islam that ISIS prescribes to, they see the Zeti people as apostates and worthy of death for the males and worthy of being turned into sex slaves, you know, for the young females. And so I interviewed several Zetis that talked about.

how ISIS would just enter their village and just begin killing all the males. I mean, several, you know, very gruesome things. They would just execute the males. A lot of times they would, you know, pardon my friends for describing something that's fairly, you know, disturbing. But, I mean, they would cut the men's heads off and play soccer with their heads in the roads. I mean, there was, it was, you know, extreme brutality that ISIS was invoking on the Azetti people there. And so about, you know, about between 20 and 30,000,

Zedis fled up to the top of Mount Sinjar, an area that the Kurds call Shingal. And so they were waiting on top of Mount Sinjar. And they were expecting that, you know, the group called the Peshmerga, which is the armed group by, you know, southern Kurdistan, the KRG, which is the Kurdish regional government there, had trained the Peshmerga group. But at that time, they weren't trained, you know, properly or they hadn't had a lot of conflicts, you know, recently. And so they actually, you know, fled the area, and it left the Azetti people basically trapped on Mount Sinjar waiting for ISIS to come to the top of the mountain and Gildomal. Well, at this time, groups aligned with the KCK, basically the PKK, the Ypege and Yipj, or the YPG and YPJ, I used the Kurdish pronunciations of the letters. But they heard about the Azetti people being trapped on Mount Sinjar, and basically the PKK primarily came to the Yzzetti people. their rescue. And you had a group of, you know, only several dozen PKK guerrillas who held off,

you know, about 2,000 ISIS fighters at the foot of the mountain. About half of the PKK fighters were women as well, which is in line with their larger membership as about 40% female conscription. And so, you know, the PKK fighters held off ISIS and allowed these 20 to 30,000 Zetis to escape to safety down to the mountain. I mean, I talked to Zetis who were carried on their backs of you know, different PKK fighters who, you know, Zettis were wounded. And so after this happened, even, you know, the U.S. landed on top of the mountain and actually even thanked the PKK. And the irony that you had of this is that the PKK is listed as a foreign terrorist

organization by the United States. And so you had this strange situation where because of deference to Turkey, the United States have used the PKK as terrorists on paper. But meanwhile, the foreign terrorist group, i.e. B.A.K. are the ones saving, you know, 30,000 is any people on Mount Sinai from a group who I would say fits the definition of terrorists, if any group does, like ISIS, who are truly terrifying, you know, people in the area with their actions. And so at that time, I think it brought a broadened, it brought a larger interest in the Kurds globally. And also it made a lot of Americans start to scratch their head and wonder, hey, so both, of these groups are terrorists, but one is saving thousands of people, and the other one is chopping their heads off? Like, how can this be? You know, why, you know, is American politics discounting any kind of morality in the way that they view different groups? And so that is what I would say is part of the emergence of Kurds on the global scene. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's how

a lot of Americans have heard of them. Would you want to go back just a little bit for some listeners that might not be as caught up on all of these acronyms. Could you go ahead and kind of delineate? Yeah, sure. I mean, the other thing that I always tell Americans are Westerners to brace for when they begin studying the Kurdish topic. Obviously, I'm not Kurdish myself, which is what I want to make very clear right off the bat. I'm an American, and I don't ever really try to speak for the Kurds, but I hope that I can be an echo of sort of their struggle. And one thing of the things I try to do my best is to give their struggle, you know, proper justice and give the words of their own fighters and things, you know, precedents within my research.

But one of the things I always tell listeners when you begin to study this topic as well is be ready for a flurry of acronyms, most of them three letters, but sometimes they get into four or five, six letters for a lot of the groups. To kind of conceptualize this, you have at the very top group called the KCCK, which comes from the Kurdish translation, you know, Coma Sivakim Kyrgyzstan or Kurdistan, but I'll just give you the English translations of all of them. So KCK in English is the Kurdistan Community's Union. And the KCK is sort of the umbrella apoist organization for the various Kurdish guerrilla groups. So within the KK, which is a group that covers all of greater Kurdistan, the four regions,

in the Turkish region you have the PKK, which is from the Turkish translation. But in English, it would be the Kurdistan Workers Party, is the PKK. And within, under the PKK, you have their male and female fighters. So the male fighters are called the Hepege or HPG, which is the people's defense forces. And the Yeja Estar, or YJA Star, or YJA Star, which in English would be the free women's units Ishtar from the, you know, from the goddess Ishtar. In Rojava, you have a group called, you know, the PYD, which is the Democratic Union Party in English. but then they have their two guerrilla groups, which, and at this point, I don't even know if you'd classify them as solely guerrilla, because they're almost more of a conventional army at this point, but within that you have the Yepege and the Yepege and the Yepege.

So within, you know, the Yepege or YPG would be people's defense forces in English, and the Yepeje would be the women's defense units. Alongside that in Iran or in Rojolat, what the Kurds would call Rojolat, what the Kurds would call Rojolat, you have a group called PJack, and, you know, Pijack is within the KCK as well. In English, they would be the Kurdistan Free Life Party, and then they have male and female units as well. The YRK, the Eastern Kurdistan units, and the Hepeje, the Women's Defense Forces. So, you know, that kind of covers the various guerrilla groups, but then it gets even more complicated sometimes for people, because within Turkey,

you have, you know, the primary civil political party is the HDP or the Hedepad. This is Selahatine Demertosh and Feigen Yuxedug are the male and female co-leaders. One thing to remember with all of these groups is all of them have a female and male co-leadership. So each of them will have, you know, one male, one female as, you know, as a leader and as part of the leadership. to believe in sort of gender parity. But as some of the other acronyms, I guess, that you may hear during this discussion would be, within Turkey, you have a group called the TAC, the T.A.K., the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks. They are a splinter breakaway group from the BAK, and they sort of act as an ominous warning to Turkey

that if you do not negotiate with the BAC, this is a group that will carry out attacks, which have a higher likelihood of arming civilians. And so there's a group that, you know, is sometimes in the news as well. And, of course, Turkey says that they are just to be, you know, under a different name. But from my research, I know that they're different. And that's because Turkey views, you know, the Kurds as enemies and they want to kind of slander them as all terrorists, which makes it easier to attack them and implement policies.

Yeah, I mean, the government of Turkey is pretty much, sees every Kurdish political group adversarily, except for probably the KDP, which is the Kurdistan Democratic Party in southern Kurdistan, i.e. Iraqi Kurdistan. The AKP government, which is the Turkish party in Turkey, is aligned with the KDP and, you know, Masoud Barzani in Iraqi Kurdistan. So that is—those two groups actually do work together at times, and it causes friction with all of the other, you know, at Kurdish parties as well, because sometimes Turkey will the line with the KDP against the other political parties, the other main political party

in southern Kurdistan is the Puk, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Party. But then you have, you know, the Azettis created their own guerr units as well, the Yaba S, the Sinjar resistance units, and the Yejjayi, which are the Yaziai, which are the Yazadi women's units. And so these are groups that now fight in Sinjar around the mountain I was discussing before. And the PAK set up these groups, but then they gave them a separate name so that they can be unlinked from a lot of the baggage that comes with. being aligned with the BKK, but pretty much all of the Apoas groups are under the KCCA umbrella.

And that's why, you know, you'll see pictures of Abdullah Ocelon, the PKK leader, or, you know, the Red Star, which is, you know, emblematic through a lot of their flags and different things, regardless of, you know, regardless of the party you're talking about. All right. Well, I want to touch on a little bit later the notion of, you know, Turkish government versus, different aspects of the Kurds and that recent attack when Erdogan's diplomatic team came to America and there's that there's that brutal beating that they put on protesters here on American soil but before we get on to get into that I wanted to kind of ask you what because I know you went to Kurdistan and and I want to know all the information surrounding that why did you go where did you go and how long were you there all of that so if you could maybe touch on your experiences on the ground there that'd be awesome

Sure. I basically, in 2014, on August of 2014, I went to Kurdistan. You know, obviously I would call these this area Kurdistan, but I guess formally I went to Turkey to start out with. And for about five months, I conducted my research throughout Kurdistan, throughout Bakur, which is northern Kurdistan, i.e. Turkey, throughout Rojava and throughout the shore, Syria and Iraq. I guess you would say. The only area I didn't go to was Iran, i.e. Roselot. I did my, you know, I was there for five months. Primarily, I was based in city of Ahmed, which Turkey officially calls it the other car. But, you know, to the Kurds, it's called Ahmed. And so, you know, as a side note, one of the things to sort of clarify is, you know,

sometimes geographical names carry with them a certain political meaning. So, for instance, to use another Middle East conflict, if you're saying, saying that you're in the West Bank versus, I mean, Judea or Samara, you know, you're basically making a political statement by saying where you are. So I oftentimes try to do my best to use the Kurdish names for these cities, because all of these occupied cities have a Kurdish name, although they're not the official name for these places, but I will give the sort of official name as well so people will know where I'm talking about if they look on a map and don't know the Kurdish name already.

Yeah, I was based in the Abakar, I.E. Ahmed, the de facto capital of Kurdistan, which is a very large city, you know, the largest city Kurdish one in southeastern Turkey. And I was based there. I had an apartment there near an old city called Sir, which has now been completely obliterated and destroyed by the Turkish government after I left. Luckily, I was at least able to, you know, take in some of the grandeur of the place while I was still there because there's basically Roman-era walls built. around the entire part of Sur, which, you know, several miles wide. I mean, these are walls from, you know, 2,000 years ago that are still preserved. And, I mean, some of them are broken up, but, I mean, massive huge walls around the old city. And within that, you know, a lot of these are the old streets that existed, you know, 2,000 years ago. You know, one time, it wasn't just Kurds that lived there.

And Ahmed, there's an Armenian Christian church there. And the Kurds have tried to do a lot of sort of cultural. work to bring in, you know, the Armenians that previously were, you know, killed off by the Turkish government in the early 20th century and the Assyrian groups who were wiped out as well. To understand sort of the politics in Turkey, you have to, you know, realize how, you know, the Kurds are one of the indigenous groups in Anatolia, you know, along with, you know, I would say the indigenous groups in Anatolia would be the Kurds in the southeast, Armenians in the northeast, the Pontic Greeks along the coast of Anatolia, and then you had the

Assyrians as well. And so, you know, Turks as a group basically came in around the 11th century into Anatolia, i.e. Turkey. And so over time, what you had was sort of the same kind of dynamic that you would see in North America with sort of European colonization. The Turks did the same thing. And then you saw the, basically the same elements of settlerism that you would see in, you know, in the Western Hemisphere took place within Turkey. The displacement, the, you know, genocide, the different things of the various ethnic groups that lived, you know, in those areas. And so over time, now you get to the point where Turkey, all of the other groups in Turkey were basically wiped out except for the Kurds. The Kurds are the one remaining ethnic group that threaten the, you know, homogeneity of Turkey. course, there are still lots of other ethnic groups within Turkey that haven't been completely wiped out,

but they're not sizable enough at this point. You know, Circassians, different, you know, Tatars, different other groups, but their numbers aren't enough to, you know, become politically significant in the way that the Kurds are. Within Turkey, we have at least probably 20 million Kurds. I would put the number between 20 and 22 million Kurds in a country of, you know, 70 or so million. So, you know, when you remove the Kurds, though, other than that, you know, Turkey would be very, you know, homogeneous. And so I, sorry, I kind of got off on a tangent there, but I was, you know, living in the city

of Ahmed, and since I was studying armed guerrillas and the PKK, you know, first you have to make a lot of contacts in order to be trusted by an organization. like the P.E.A.K. So I had to do a lot of meetings, you know, within Ahmed and through the various cities with different political figures to build up my trust and build of my credentials with the different groups. I was also, you know, several well-known, you know, Kurdish political figures were able to vouch for me because I've become friends with them, you know, the former mayor of Sir Abdullah Demabash and, you know, different various high, you know, well-known political, Kurdish political figures were able to meet me and sort of see that. the kind of research that I was doing, I would say to backtrack my connection to Kurdistan and the Kurds goes back even prior to this trip. I actually lived in Turkey for three years as a child from around 1988 to 1991. My father, who was in the U.S. Air Force, was stationed at the base called Injurlik, or Insurlik, most Americans would say, which is in Adana, Turkey, kind of near the border of where northern Kurdistan would be, but not particularly right within the border.

And so as a child, you know, for those three years, 1988 to 1991, and during the first Gulf War, I, you know, I lived in Turkey. And this is the height of the beginning of the PKK guerrilla insurgency, which PKK was founded in 1978, but they began their first guerrilla attack in 1984. And so by 1988 to 1991, this was the height of the deed villageization campaign where the Turkish government destroyed throughout the 1990s, about 4,000 Kurdish villages. and, you know, at the time that I'm living there from age six to, you know, about six to nine or so, you know, I sort of had a vague understanding of who Kurds were, who Turks were, you know, and at this time, some of the older brothers of the younger Kurds that I know are starting to disappear, and it's because the, you know, Turkish government is killing them. A lot of times they would just fly up in a helicopter and throw them out of the helicopter or they would just execute them and never send their bodies. body back. And so the policy of the Turkish government at this time was the more brutal we become, the more we're going to drain the swamp of the guerrillas. But as a, you know, a PhD academic and somebody who studies guerrilla insurgency, I can tell you in almost every case that always works against the state that is carrying out those kind of policies. And so as the brutality of the Turkish government increased, the emergence of the, you know, PKK and the guerrillas only increased. And so you had a situation where the big AK, which started in one room of, you know, 20, 30 people. And then in the beginning was sort of several hundred people reached a point where they had 10,000 armed guerrillas and 50,000 cadres. And it'd become a large mass movement.

And it's largely in thanks to the brutality of the Turkish government to try to wipe them out. So I already had sort of a connection to the Turkish issue. And so because of that, I decided to do my doctoral research on the, on the PKK and on the Kurds. And so I went to Ahmed, and after that, I traveled to Roja Vaz well because I wanted to include elements of the YPG and the YPJ or the YPage, Yipage. And so I was on the border of the city of Kobani, which a lot of Americans have probably heard of during the assault on Kobani

in September of 2014. And it was a very surreal experience because I'm on the border of Kobani and I'm basically watching a war take place in real time. In front of me, I can see Turkish tanks all amassed and lined up, maybe about 40 Turkish tanks. And they're facing ISIS tanks who are rolling in front of them, but the Turks are not shooting at them. Well, come to find out, it's because, you know, ISIS is to Turkey, basically what the U.S. Coast Guard is to the U.S. Army. And they have been from the very beginning. I mean, Turkey's employed ISIS as a proxy force against the Kurds, primarily and against Assad as well. But at this time, I mean, I was stationed in a village on the border of Rojava and Turkey.

And, I mean, we could constantly see, you know, the Turkish government driving in ISIS fighters and ambulances almost, you know, on a near daily basis. And while I'm watching this battle take place in real time, I'm watching the Turkish tanks aligned facing the ISIS tanks. and Issa tanks are attacking the Yepege and the Yepege fighters who are on the Stiner Hill, and then all of a sudden the U.S. jets will fly in and then carry out an airstrike. You know, and if you're within like a kilometer of the airstrike, which I usually was, I mean, the ground shakes. I mean, it's a very sort of jolting experience. And it was very surreal to sort of be watching a battle take place in real time

and have it all taking place within that, you know, a distance that you can watch. So that was my experience, you know, on the border there. and Kobani. Eventually, the city was completely leveled, but the Kurds did manage to keep ISIS from taking the city primarily thanks to their own bravery and the fact that it was just a street-to-street battle. I mean, the Kurds refer to it as the Kurdish Stalingrad, you know, because the city had just been decimated near rubble and it was a street-to-street fight. Also, you know, some of the U.S. airstrikes did help around the edge and perimeter of the city as far as, you know, preventing ISIS from getting into the city. And so, You know, that was part of my time in Rojava, and then the sort of large part of my research was, we'll just take a step back. I basically visited every city, you know, in Kurdistan, starting out in Ahmed, you know, but I went to, you know, Ahmed, the city of Batman, or what Americans would just say is Batman, no relation to the superhero. Kurds actually called the city Ila, but, you know, Batman, I went to Mardin. then I went to, you know, Hakari and Sarnak, and then, you know, city won,

and then over across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, you know, Duhok. These are Kurdish cities, Duhok, Kowler, Slemani, Mokmore, where the PKK were based. So I was with the VK and Mokmore for a while. And then, you know, Kerk, and then the – and then I went. went to Ken Dill, which is basically the home base of the P.A.K. So that's where my interviews with the Kurdish guerrillas took place with the P.K. Guerrillas. Basically, I interviewed 20 PKK for about five hours apiece, so about 100 hours of interviews with armed FKK guerrillas. And I interviewed veteran PKK mostly. I mean, some of them have been in 20 years, some 15 years, some 10 years.

and I interviewed them on a whole bunch of different aspects. I was interested in primarily their pre-guirala life and the kind of conditions that led them to joining the PKK because I have theories that go with my research on radicalization and why people are driven to violence and things. And so a lot of my research is focused on the time before they were a gorilla. But to tell the story of the Big AK, you really have to study Kurds as a whole and as a group.

And so, although I was studying this one organization, you know, my research and my dissertation, which ended up being about 900 pages, which is very long, you know, long for a dissertation if people are familiar with dissertation. Like, you know, I had to conduct sort of a overall history of Kurdistan itself, you know, which, you know, was fairly lengthy part of my research was sort of telling the backstory of the Kurds in general. the different regions and how the sort of PECA arose within that context.

And so that's sort of a basic kind of overview of my research. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's extremely fascinating. I can't imagine that sort of experience and how it had to affect sort of your, your global worldview and your politics. But let's transition a little bit, because I know that this is kind of the meat of the discussion, and I know a lot of people are really anxious to kind of hear your explanation of this, but what is the Rojavan revolution? How would you go ahead and sum that up and kind of let people know what that's all about? Yeah, to understand the Rozavre Revolution, you really have

to understand the, you know, KKK and PKK Revolution, which sort of set the framework for it. The Roosevelt Revolution arose from, you know, during the 1980s and 1990s, the BKK actually had a camp in Beka Valley and Lebanon, but the P.A.K. leader, Abdullah Ochan, was actually based in Syria in Damascus. And at the time, the Syrian government preferred to allow the B.A.K. to be based in Syria because it kind of felt that as long as they didn't mess with the Syrian government, but, you know, carried out their resistance against Turkey, that it would be beneficial to, you know, allow them to be there. But the irony of it is that at that same time, the Syrian government was cracking down on the Kurds that lived within Syria. So the Kurds that lived

within Rojava fringes. They didn't have linguistic rights. They didn't have language rights to speak in Kurdish. A lot of them didn't have passports. So the government of Syria kept Kurds from even being officially citizens so they couldn't vote. The Assad's father also had an area or a policy where he tried to create what's called the Arab Belt in northern Syria, where he displaced large amounts of Kurds and he brought in Arab settlers to those regions and renamed the city's Arab names and things. And so they were, Syrian government was trying to push you know, the Kurds out of the area that you would call Rojava, and that they call Rojava now. But at the same time, they were allowing the P.A.K. to be based there because of, but as long as

they focused solely on Turkey and not the Syrian government. And so the roots of the Rojava Revolution were actually planted sort of in the 80s and 90s throughout this fact that a lot of the, you know, some of the best sort of P.A.K. fighters and things were actually Syrian Kurds who came up, you know, through those conditions. So the revolution, you know, when the Syrian civil war, if you would call it that, or when the Syrian revolution began against the Assad regime or the Assad government, I guess, depending on one's view, the Kurds at that point were sort of on the sideline. Because although a lot of them didn't support the Assad government, they were worried what the

alternative would be, you know, through the various factions that were rebelling against Assad. To the religious sort of Salafist elements, to the, you know, religious Salafist anti-Assad elements, those Kurds would probably prefer to have Assad in power rather than, you know, a group like Al-Nusar, ISIS, or these other groups. And so, however, when the Syrian revolution began in the beginning, it wasn't as co-opted, I would say, by, you a lot of the fundamentalist selfish groups that basically killed off all of the moderates that were, you know, possibly in the Free Syrian Army in the very beginning. And so the Rojava revolution arose out of the fact that the Kurds and Rojava wanted to

establish their own system of government within this vacuum that was taking place within Syria. The Syrian regimes losing control of various parts of the country, you know, the Kurds within Rojavad decided, okay, well, let's take care of our own areas and let's, you know, implement our own form of philosophy called democratic confederalism. And this philosophy comes from, you know, Abdullah Ocelon, who's the imprisoned PKK leader. He was arrested in 1999 by Turkey. He was actually in Kenya, but, you know, the U.S. CIA helped Turks find him in Kenya and arrested him. And he's actually been kept on an island off of Istanbul.

The island's called Imrali Island. If you ever saw the movie in the, I forget what decade it was on, but Midnight Express of the American guy or whatever that gets thrown in a Turkish dungeon, that was actually, the real Midnight Express actually took place on Imreli Island, where Abdel Ochoan is held now. But he's the sole prisoner most of the time on Imreli Island with about 1,000 guards there to guard him. but he's been kept there since 1999 and there's I would say a direct

parallel to Nelson Mandela kept on Robin Island by South Africa and Abdullah Ogelang kept by Turkey but although he's been incarcerated since 1999 he's been able to write numerous books and hone his philosophy which he calls

Democratic Confederalism and so the Kurds and Rojova largely go by this philosophy and would you mind going ahead and explaining exactly what democratic confederalism is yeah in my research i try to break it down you know all the different elements of it because it's it's you know very syncretic and it sort combines many different things and you know even ocholein himself doesn't all the time talk

about the exact origins and a lot of times he'll say well i'm using the influences of this person but i'm adapting it to the middle east culture or conditions that that the kurd you know that the Kurds' experience. If I had to explain it in a way that most Western leftists would understand it, I would say it's a combination of various things. There is some Marxist elements to it, you know, that form the foundation of it. You could almost call it, if someone's familiar with early Austrian Marxist or Austro-Marxism, I would say, you know, forms part of it. But then you have writers, like Emmanuel Wallerstein, his idea, you know, his ideas, you know, his ideas and of the periphery and the core, and things are definitely part of it as well, mixed

in with writers like Murray Bookchin, who was, depending on who you ask, variously described as, you know, libertarian socialists, which he sort of rejected those terms. Some people call him an anarchist. He didn't like that term as well. But a communalist, you could say, you could say that democratic Confederalism also has sort of elements of anarcho-sindicalism in it. Luxembourgism, maybe. And, you know, there's various Western, you know,

canonical authors and theorists that Ocelan's using, but a lot of times he's adapting them and sort of using elements of them, and so it becomes hard to pinpoint it exactly. But some of the core elements of it would be liberation of the woman is very key in Ocelon's thinking and philosophy. says that it's actually more important to liberate women in general than it is even Kurds. So he tries to center women within his thinking. One of his quotes is, you know, that every man needs to kill the male within himself or kill the man inside of him. And so

some of my biographical analysis of Ocelon, I think, shows where he actually got this idea and the roots of that idea, I think, come from his own upbringing. Ochelon, as a young child, you know, came from a poor family, and his family actually had, you know, essentially almost traded off his sister. They were very poor at the time to an older man in marriage for, you know, supplies and food and things. And so he talks in his own writings about, you know, how he felt betrayed and how he felt like she was being, you know, co-signed to a death sentence when she was basically married off to an older man as, you know, when she was younger. And so his whole life sort of revolves around that traumatic childhood event when he was younger.

And, you know, so to understand democratic and federalism, you have to sort of trace its origins back to, you know, the PKK began as sort of a Marxist-Leninist-Nist-Leninist group. They even had elements that, I would say, of Guevarism, you know, his ideas of the FOCO, and Maoism, you could even say, as well, added in. But after Ocelon's capture in 1999, but even before, it actually began even before, several years before that, you started to see influence of other people, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union as well. And so the, you know, this is around the time when Murray-Booking's ideas sort of start to, you know, infiltrate the PKK thinking as well. But some of those early elements are still there, you know, so it's hard to define, you know, if someone says, well, is the Rozova Revolution, Marxist, isn't anarchists, isn't socialists? It's definitely socialist in the sense that it's anti-capitalist.

Now, whether one would call it Marxist or anarchist or get into the sort of sectarian, you know, semantic feud of what group can take ownership of it, I would really say it's none of those. They would say, well, we're democratic confederals. We're not taking a line. And so that's why I think you've seen groups with the International Freedom Battalion and different various groups, the MLKP, different Marxist groups from Turkey have fought in the Rojova Revolution as well as, you know, you have groups like the Bob Grove Brigade.

You have groups that are exclusively anarchists that have joined and fought as well there. And then one of the interesting elements is sometimes you have, have what I would call sort of right-leaning or right-wing Americans who join up and go there. Now, a lot of times they go there not understanding what the Rojova revolution is. Some of them have sort of delusions of grandeur, or they're infected with what I would, you know, with sort of Orientalist ideas of, you know, white saviorism or things. And so they'll join and go to Rojava as well.

A lot of them usually become disenchanted or leave, or some of them do stay and prove to be fairly helpful or even adapt their thinking as well, you know, more in line with Democratic and federalism. But the Kurds generally, you know, allow, you know, any of the groups that want to assist in their revolution. Yeah, I think there's interesting parallels there with the Zapatistas and Chiapas as far as being very difficult to pinpoint and for one tendency on the left to claim it, you know, to the exclusion of another. I've always found that parallel to be kind of there. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely there. And even Ocelan himself, you know, talks about Subcomonante Marcos.

And I think the Zapatis have influenced the BKK and the wider KCK movement a lot. Several different authors and theorists have, you know, I've pointed out those parallels. The parallel is definitely there. I think the, you know, the way that Subcoma Nanti Marcos, or, you know, he goes by different names as well, but have utilized, you know, poetic symbolism. I think Ocholein has tried to sort of embrace some of that. And, you know, he's also, the Rozova Revolution has also sort of taken some of the ideas from the Zapatistas and the different ways that they organize communally.

So, yeah, I would say that's a fair comparison. Yeah, I think there's something inherently materialist about both of those movements and that they're adapting, you know, a plethora of ideas to their material conditions, which are so unique, you know, that they can't be, you can't implement anything in a vacuum. Like in the Zapatista case, there's that heavy influence of Mayan culture that comes into play. And I think in this case, you have elements of that as well, whereas, like, you're not going to have a hard and ready, you know, ideology that you can just, you can just insert, you know. What do you have to say about, would you agree with that? Do you think that's a fair analysis?

Yeah, I would You know Abdul Ocelan talks about You know What we're doing is we're taking a lot of these Western ideas And we're adapting into a Middle Eastern context Or even when I interviewed a lot of the PKK You know, they would talk about certain things

In Western contexts Can't be transfused and just brought into this environment Similarly, you know Ocelon, one of the countries Ocelain You know, points to is Switzerland And the way that it You know, handles the different linguistic differences between, you know, Italian, French, and German, and the way that

the, you know, the government is set up within Switzerland and things, and so sometimes he holds this up as an example, well, why can't we use certain ideas from the way that the Swiss manage their governing structures and kind of bring that into a Kurdish context and adapt it in the way that, you know, the Kurdish cities are organized. So, you know, a lot of the cities are organized in various ways where there'll be one organization of you know for the local kind of area of several blocks and then another group that for you know several miles area and then for the city itself and then for you know the canton even the terminology that the kurds use canton you know is a word that you'll see in some european context as well um for areas and so you know within

And the Rojava Revolution, you have, now there's four cantons, but you have the three primary ones, Ephrine, or Ephrain, which is in the far west, the Kobani Canton, which is the famous one as well, and then the Jazeera canton and the east. But, yeah, I mean, it's hard, I think you don't want to avoid trying to put the Kurds into a specific box, and sometimes this causes friction or debates within sort of the leftist community. because I would say sometimes people seeking perfectionism will say, oh, well, if the Rojava revolution truly was leftist or socialist or anti-capitalists, why are they accepting help from the United States military? You know, and to that question, I would say, you know, that sometimes, you know, well, purity is nice, but purity is very fleeting if you're lying with your family in the middle of a mass grave. You know, and sometimes for survival, you have to make strategic alliances, you know, that are not much different than the way that, you know, Mao Zetong allied with Shankic to help repel the Imperial Japanese or Ho Chi Men was willing to align with the United States, even to the point of copying the Declaration of Independence, you know, to repel the French until the United States sided, you know, with the French and ended up, you know, getting the vehicle.

and the Vietnam War, you know, so a lot of times this sort of idea of perfection of, I want a group that's completely anti-imperilous and will never work with the United States. Well, the Kurds are stuck in a situation where they don't have, in some cases, anywhere else to turn, or sometimes they're strategically utilizing the different groups against each other. So, for instance, in Rojava, the United States, you know, bombs ISIS sometimes on behalf of the YEPA, which has been official. However, the U.S. will also provide arms to the government of Turkey. And so when those same Kurds in the PYD, you know, the Yipaguer, Yipajet crossed the border

and are now with PKK guards, the Turkish government will target them and bomb them. So the same U.S. that is bombing on behalf of one KCC group in Rojova is arming an enemy of the KCG group in Turkey. And so, you know, I think the Kurds in Syria are. are, you know, they're aware of the fact that at any point the U.S. could sort of turn on them or when it isn't strategically, you know, valuable from a geopolitical standpoint to ally with them than they could favor Turkey, you know, over them. And so, you know, they've, for instance, in Rojava, they've invited, you know,

they've invited the Russians to sort of put an airbase in Afrin, which is the Canton in the far western corner of Rojava. And that's sort of there as a check and a balance in case the United States pulls their air power in deference to Turkey, you know, that they'll still have someone there to bomb ISIS because of the Rojava forces don't have an Air Force. And so, you know, I think a lot of the criticisms against the Rojava revolution from those on the left or far left are usually misguided. and, you know, they come from people that don't understand the situation on the ground or the very sort of complex nature of the different groups fighting each other. You know, if you sort of had to rank them in a ranking, you know, when the, when the Ipega and the YEPA are fighting ISIS, you obviously root for the YEPAK, you know, when Assad's forces are fighting ISIS,

the Yepege is actually rooting for Assad's forces because they see ISIS as a greater threat to them as well. But the Yipage forces don't often fight Assad's forces. They have sort of a tacit agreement. They have clashed occasionally in the past. They have sort of an agreement not to attack each other because both of them realized that ISIS is the greater threat to both of them. And because the Rojavar Kurds are not pushing for independence. They're pushing for autonomy. So they believe that the Syrian government in Damascus can.

hand, you know, doesn't need to see them as an existential threat, that as long as they're able to, you know, have regional autonomy and implement their democratic and federal system, they don't see the need to completely break away from the state of Syria itself. Right. Yeah, and I think it's really important what you said about, you know, especially Western leftists, you know, and this sort of this purity spiral that occurs. And it's almost, it's almost grotesque and it's ignorance and it's just insistence. on on this abstract you know puritanism which which is so disconnected from the realities on the ground i mean if we have this this overbearing often immoral you know largest military apparatus that's

ever existed on planet earth you know in the united states military you know them helping the courage is like the best possible scenario on how to use that use that you know military apparatus and like you said earlier it's a decision really between um some sort of idealistic purity or death and that's just not a fair position to demand people you know pick purity over so I think it's important

yeah I mean yeah even you know the way you could say is if you're anti you know the tenants that are part of the Rosa philosophy and revolution you know are gender equality you know economic sustainability

socialism anti-capitalism if the you know imperial world machine of the United States wants to bomb on your behalf, and they still know that you hold those political positions, I mean, why would you refuse, you know, at that point? I mean, if they, you know, it's sort of like, I recently did a talk in Milwaukee about, you know, these kind of issues, and a guy in the audience asked me, you know, he said, hey, what's with that red star, you know? I come from an era where, you know, we don't support red stars. That's socialism or communism or something, you know, and I told him, well, you know, sometimes in life you have to make choices, you know, do you want your taxes raise or do you want your head cut off? And, you know, it's sort of like if the U.S. government decides that a group of, you know,

communalist, anti-capitalist, egalitarian, you know, people that believe in, you know, ecological sustainability are less threatening than, you know, ISIS, and they want to bomb on your behalf. Of course, you accept that. Now, you don't completely sell out your principles, and the Kurds are, you know, constantly stressing the United States. Listen, we're willing to ally with you, but, you know, we have fundamental things that we can't compromise on. And thus far, the U.S. has been willing to, you know, allow the Rochival Revolution to develop, you know, naturally as it has. And where you see this clash is because the state of Turkey and the government of Turkey and Erdogan, the Turkish dictator, or I.E. President of Turkey, is expecting

the U.S. to sort of follow the traditional pattern that they have in the past, where you really have what's called a good Kurd, bad Kurd syndrome. The United States has always seen the Kurds that live in northern Iraq, you know, Iraqi Kurdistan, i.e. southern Kurdistan, as the good Kurds. So, for instance, when Saddam Hussein was gassing those Kurds in 1980, during what was called the Al-Anfalka campaign and the famous case of Halabjo, or Halibcha, which most Americans have seen, you know, the case of the guy holding a young child, you know, dead on the ground after being killed with poison gas. When Saddam was agassing the Kurds in the late 1980s, the U.S. held that up as sort of the,

you know, textbook example of brutality, right? And even when the United States invaded Iraq, the first time and go for one and And in Gulf War II, they constantly held up the fact that Saddam had gassed his own people. That was the quote that you always heard, you know, gassed his own people, Kimmel-Ali and everything. And so those Kurds were always seen as the good Kurds. However, what people forget is during the 1990s, when the U.S. was using a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to stop Saddam from killing his Kurds, the state of Turkey was enacting a similar policy to Saddam's in Al-Anfault, where Turkey was destroying 4,000 Kurdish villages, killing tens of thousands of Kurds.

And there's a notorious prison called Diabakar Prison Number Five, which is in Ahmed where thousands of Kurds were tortured, with the most heinous kind of torture. You can imagine some of them lit themselves on fire, actually, in protest. A lot of the famous PKK martyrs are famous for basically self-immolation, letting themselves on fire inside the jails. And so while the U.S. was upholding Saddam's brutality, against the Kurds as a reason for why he was the most evil man on earth, the U.S. in just the year 1997 alone sold more arms to Turkey than they did all other nations in the Cold War, with the exception of Egypt and Israel, you know, taken out of the equation.

And so what you had was a case that the United States in 1997 was just pouring arms into Turkey, and the Turkish national budget was, you know, buying tons of attack helicopters. COBRA attack helicopters and things from the United States. And in exchange for that, the U.S. put the PKK on the terrorist list. They hadn't been on a terrorist list previously. And they had been fighting a guerrilla war for 13 years up to that point. And so really, when you see that, it doesn't take a cynic or a social scientist to understand that the reason why the BK were listed as a terrorist group was because Turkey said, hey, if we're going to give you, you know, tens of billions of dollars for these attack helicopters,

we need something from you as well. So the U.S. put them on the terrorist list in 1997. and then the EU followed suit in 2002. And so, you know, up to this day, the PKK still listed as a terrorist organization by United States and EU. And unfortunately, that becomes the way that a group is referred to throughout the entire world. So despite the fact that PKK are not seen as terrorists in Russia or in China or in all

the nations of Africa or in all the nations of South America, you know, they get branded as, oh, you know, PAKR terrorist group, yes, to the United States and the EU. That sort of becomes the way that a group is referred to globally, even though 90% of the nations of the world actually don't see them that way. It's a very small group of nations to do. And the only reason why they do is because it's business interests with Turkey. For instance, Germany provides Turkey a lot of the tanks that they use to destroy Kurdish villages, and the U.S. provides Turkey a lot of the attack helicopters and weapons and things through NATO. And so you have the complicity of the U.S. and the EU.

you know, arming Turkey and basically allowing Turkey to whatever they want to their Kurds. And that's where you get the good Kurds, bad Kurds syndrome that the Kurds in Turkey were seen as bad Kurds and not deserving of their own rights, but the ones in Iraq were sort of the good Kurds that all Americans lie. Yeah, it's just this like tactical use

of human beings for their own, you know, imperial desires and strategies. And it also occurs to me when we're speaking of this that, you know, sadly, like the president of the United States at this moment, Donald Trump, Do you think he knows anything that we've covered today? Like he has such an ignorance of all the complexities and nuances of the situation that it's scary to think of him being the one to make decisions regarding, you know, these millions and millions of people in this area. It's interesting that you say that because I wrote a column for website Kurdish question, which I've, you know, written two articles for them, you know, since Trump has been elected president.

And the first one I wrote was on Trump and the Kurds, and it was a fairly lengthy article where I explained how, you know, throughout American, you know, contemporary history, regardless of the political, you know, party that was in power, the Kurds basically got screwed over. And that's why you have the famous Kurdish proverb, no friends, but the mountains, because the only thing they can rely on are the mountains when they have to run away when the Western powers, you know, basically, you know, leave them hanging out to dry. And so in that article, you know, I talk about pre, you know, pre-election or during, while he was running, Trump showed sort of a passing, you would say, a passing appreciation for the Kurds in several interviews, actually. He was in one way. He was in Nashville, Tennessee, which most Americans don't know this. There's only about 15,000 Kurds that live in the United States, and most of them actually live in Nashville, Tennessee. It just sort of organically happened that following the first Gulf War, Kurds started moving to Nashville. Some of the Kurdish refugees started to be putting in Nashville. So a lot of the Kurds from Iraqi Kurdistan or southern Kurdistan live in Nashville.

You also have little pockets of Kurds in San Diego and a few other places. But most Kurds live in Nashville in the United States. And so there was a time where Trump was visiting Nashville and he was asked about the Kurds, and he said something to the effect an interview of, you know, the Kurds are the best fighters. They're the ones we can rely on. We should be arming the Kurds and, you know, they're the ones that are going to help us to defeat ISIS and, you know, he sort of had a, you know, a superficial appreciation for the Kurds, you could say. And so understandably, when a lot of Kurds saw this, they felt like, okay, yeah, you know, here's finally a U.S. leader who's going to, you know, stand up for us and, you know, who has an appreciation for us over Turkey.

however almost right after that you know Trump then does an interview where he basically admits that he has sort of a I think he called it a big conflict of interest because he has two Trump towers in Istanbul and things and then you find out that Michael Flynn his national security advisor is being paid you know 500,000 dollars by the government of Turkey and then you start to realize all the ways that the Turks have basically laid the groundwork to already infiltrate you know Trump's regime if you want to call it that and I think once Trump got in power, he obviously didn't understand the various differences. But even in some of his speeches, he's talked about, you know, recently he said, you know, he made the absurd statement that he, you know, the U.S. is, you know, willing to assist, you know, the YPG and the YPJ in Rojava against ISIS and also assist Turkey against the V.AK, not realizing that those are basically the same two groups. The P-A-K and the YP-G are both under the K-C-K. So if you're going to help Turkey bomb the P-A-K, you're basically bombing a K-C-K group with one hand and then bombing on behalf of a K-C-K group, the P-YD in Rojava on the other hand.

And it really kind of explains this sort of absurdity of U.S. foreign policy in the region when it comes to the Kurds, and it's why it's so hard to map out the situation because a lot of people refer to Kurds as a group, But even when you say Kurdish guerrillas, there's various groups. So, for instance, you know, the U.S. sees the PKK as terrorists. But the Pijack, that group I talked about, which is in Iran, and that fights the Iranian government, sometimes the CIA will go into, you know, Pijack areas in Iran and sort of try to get them,

get the Pijack to attack the Iranian regime, you know, and so you have or sort of work with them in unison. But so when that same Pijack, Kurdish guerrilla, is in Iran, he's an ally of the United States. States, roughly. But when he crosses the border into Turkey, sometimes it'll be the exact same person, even the same fighter. When he switches into a PKK uniform and he's now in Turkey, the U.S. is aiding Turkey to try to bomb and kill him. When he then passes into Rojavei and switches into the camo, the kind of attire that the Jepage wears, the U.S. is now bombing on his behalf sort of as their air force. And so the same individual can be, have the U.S. act as his air force and act as the one trying to help Turkey bomb him,

you know, depending on the geographic position he's standing in at the moment. Right. Wow. And so, you know, you really enter into this sort of bizarro world where the U.S. is so intertangled in a lot of these conflicts where sometimes the U.S. is even fighting the U.S. one of the problems, even when I was in Rojava, is that you had is that the Pentagon and the State Department favored Rojava

and the Kurds, but the CIA favored the FSA. And so you had these strange situations where you had embedded CIA with the FSA who were being shot at by groups of Kurdish fighters who were embedded with special forces. And so you had the U.S. special forces shooting at the U.S. CIA. And so, you know, a lot of times, even sometimes the U.S. government is at war with itself in some of these conflicts. And because, you know, the U.S. government isn't even a single entity, it's a large thing with, you know, billions of dollars of budget and all these things, you really wonder how an individual like Trump or even someone who was highly educated could even keep track of it all. And really, you know, as I said earlier today in one of my posts, you know, I talk about the U.S. is the arsonist and the firefighter. A lot of times they create the problem and they sell you the solution to it.

you know, another analogy I've used in the past is the USA's, the window repair man, and they hand out rocks for free. Right, right. And so, you know, it's really good for business that the Middle East basically stays on fire because the U.S. economy right now mostly produces Cheetos and killer drones. And if those are the two things, you know, if you are running a service economy where you don't produce a lot of material things in factories, but you do produce a lot of war toys, then you're going to need. a lot of customers. And that's where you enter into the situation that yesterday, Trump signed the largest arms deal in history, $350 billion to the Saudi government. And when you consider that if you wanted to say, you know, in the past Bush talked about

an axis of evil, well, the axis of ISIS, I would say, is Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Basically, the government of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are sort of the axis of ISIS that support ISIS, Saudi Arabia and Qatar provide the oil money, and then Turkey provides the logistics. Turkey a lot of times will bring in ISIS fighters from East Turkestan in eastern China. That's why you've had a lot of problems with, you know, the government of Turkey and China. Turkey will bring in Chechens, they'll bring in, you know, Uyghurs from East Turkestan. They'll bring in groups from, you know, Tajik's, all different kind of ethnic or Turkic groups. They'll fly in and basically bring, you know, shuttle in the ISIS fighters.

And it's sort of what I would call the most obvious but least known secret in the world that most Americans don't actually understand that Turkey is the primary force behind ISIS. They're on the ground. It's an understood fact that nobody would even dispute. Everyone knows it because a lot of the tank drivers in ISIS were embedded Turkish, you know, commandos and special forces and things. And even within Turkey, there are certain cities within Turkey that are basically ISIS hubs, you know, where ISIS literature is on every block, people wearing ISIS t-shirts, things like that.

And what you've had in Turkey is the AKP government of Erdogan has used, you know, he's basically pitted the secularist Turks against the Kurds. And he's sort of taken the sort of larger, he's basically a populist demagogue in Turkey that has exploited the fact that in Turkey historically you had a group called the White Turks and the Brown Turks. And Erdogan claims to be the leader of the Brown Turks, i.e. the disenfranchised, the darker skin Turks that live in central Turkey, and have been excluded from the, you know, economic conditions of coastal Turkey on the far west, which are the, i.e. white Turks, the lighter

skin and the ones that live in the coastal cities, which have been. have a lot more development. But he's used Islam as the tool to basically build that movement up. And so by taking a lot of these economically disenfranchised people within Turkey, they are then prone to join ISIS, because he's taking the unemployed of Turkey and telling them, well, the real terrorists are the PKK or the Kurdish fighters. And so a lot of times Turkey's looking the other way. They had, it was called the jihadist highway or whatever, the flight that would go from Istanbul to, you know, to southeastern Turkey. And then they would just cross the border, you know, on a daily basis. So it's when I, actually, when I was in Rojabah, there was a CNN crew, interesting story.

There was a CNN crew there on the border with me when I was on the border. And I told the CNN crew, why aren't you filming a lot of the things that are going on? The fact that the Turks are not even firing at ISIS, the fact that they're driving. driving all these ISIS fighters across the border. And the guy in his camera crew basically admitted to me, if I filmed this and we air it, our license to broadcast in Turkey is going to be pulled immediately by Erdogan and we'll never be able to operate in Turkey again.

And so it was one of those ha moments where you realize, okay, yeah, you know, these aren't conspiracies and these aren't people trying to hide the truth. A lot of this is politics, a lot of this is geopolitics at play. And the truth is out there, but a lot of it's remained, a lot of it is remained, you know, under the surface for a different reason. Yeah, I mean, I'm learning so much just from interviewing you and I hope to God that this interview gets out to a lot of people and they can learn from it too and kind of parse out some of these complexities because for the average American, even for the, you know, relatively well-informed American,

this is something that, you know, very few of us have any real understanding of. so I really appreciate you know you coming on and giving your expertise and hopefully we could have you back on but I do want to wrap up here so I'll ask one last quick question are you optimistic about the future you know in these regards and what are your hopes for the region and the people I would say I'm fairly optimistic for the you know Kurdish movement I think that you know although things are very difficult for them now I mean historically they've actually been much worse, and they're probably at the pinnacle of their power and sort of autonomy, you know, that they have been in several centuries at the moment right now. I think that ideally, you know, the revolution in Rojava can be an example, you know, for the wider world and for, you know, people all around the world of what's possible.

I do remain sort of skeptical or cynical about, you know, the roles and the ways that, you know, Western powers like the United States can end up botching the situation or trying to help. And I am worried that, you know, the government of Turkey will end up pitting Kurds against each other. There's a Kurdish phrase, Bracuzi, which is, you know, war of brothers that has occurred in the 1990s where basically the government of Turkey got various Kurdish parties in Iraq to fight, you know, the Kurdish guerrillas. And the Turkish governments also in the past used a group called the Village Guard, where they basically paid other Kurds to fight, you know, the groups of Kurds that sort of divide and conquer strategy. So I am sort of worried about, you know, the potential pitfalls that could occur.

However, I think, you know, the revolution in Rojova is on a stable enough footing where it's not going to be easily defeated. And I hope that, you know, basically southern Kurdistan or northern Iraq, and Rojava can, you know, mend their own political differences, because you have a political disagreement there between, you know, the two ruling parties in each place, and that eventually those two areas can get autonomy or independence. And so, and then be a springboard for the Kurds that remain occupied within Turkey and Iran. I think, you know, the situation in Iran will depend on what happens with the United States. If the United States attacks Iran or there's some future war with Iran. The Kurds will, once again, I think, be given a window or an opportunity

to create their own autonomy. Just sort of by luck of the draw, they happen to be located in many of the places that the U.S. is thinking about invading or attacking. So you have the potential for the Kurds to be at the center stage again in any kind of situation with Iran. But really, I think the situation with Turkey is the most pivotal. And until the U.S. reigns in Turkey, I think, and removes them from NATO and requires them to end their occupation of Kurdish cities and over 20 million Kurds, I don't think much will actually change in that region. However, you know, Rojava itself won't be defeated by any Turkish invasion, or, you know,

they are setting such a solid foundation that they're not going to be defeated easily. And I think that's at least a positive for left us all around the world or for people who have started to believe that maybe there isn't even a reason to struggle or maybe it's just who have maybe embraced nihilism or defeatism that a group of people can actually take up arms and try to create a destiny for themselves. Right. Well said. would you give any last minute recommendations or anything that people that really want to learn more about this complex subject where they can go to to do that anything that you could recommend on that front yeah i mean as far as books or documentaries i mean documentaries there is one called all recommends several there's one from 2000 called good curds bad curds that actually you know talks a lot about this he interviewed ojlan in the documentary as well

And then there's three recent ones that came out in the last, you know, several years. One's called Bakur, which looks at the Kurds in Turkey. There's one called Sarah. My whole life was a struggle, which looks at one of the female founders of the PKK, Sanchis, who is actually assassinated in Paris by a Turkish MIT, their version of the CIA, who killed her and two other female Kurdish activists in Paris several years back. and that documentary that looks at her life and then there's one called

Goulistan Land of Roses as well as far as books several recent ones that came out my own book will hopefully be out sometime later this year which under my name Thoreau Red Crow on the PKK but as far as books that are already out

as well I would probably recommend Paul White's book called the PKK coming down from the mountains and then Vera Akarius Kelly's got one out the militant Kurds, a dual strategy for freedom. So I would recommend those two books. But I mean, obviously there's, for my dissertation, I read, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different books on the BEK and the Kurdish movement in general.

But that's a good place to start. All right. Well, there's so many more questions and things and roads I want to go down with you. Hopefully you can come on another time and we can have more of these discussions because I think they're so important and very few people are so knowledgeable and well-spoken on the topic that I have access to. and they're by extension my listeners have access to but for now that's going to be it thank you so so much for coming on i really appreciate all the time that you've dedicated to

this and yeah thank you so much well thanks i appreciate it and uh as they say in the kurdistan biji kurdistan Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.