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Jefferson23

(30,099 posts)
Thu May 28, 2015, 04:06 PM May 2015

The Kurdish enclave still resisting the tyranny of President Assad and militant fighters ( Syria )

5/27/2015

In Syrian Kurdish cantons along the Turkish border, the progressive aims of the 2011 uprising are being enacted despite the war. Patrick Cockburn returns to Amuda

The last time I crossed the Tigris River between Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria was just before the war in 2003 when I was coming from Damascus. I crossed in an elderly flat-bottomed metal boat, its decrepit appearance making me afraid that the engine would give out and we would drift down river into territory controlled by Saddam Hussein’s forces.

Last week I crossed the Tigris again going in the opposite direction, travelling from the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) territory into the isolated Syrian Kurdish statelet in north-east Syria known as “Jazira”. Its defenders are the only military force in Iraq and Syria to have repeatedly defeated Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.

Saddam Hussein is long gone and the political geography of the whole region has been transformed by war in the past 11 years since I last passed this way. One feature of the journey that has not changed is that it is the same old metal boat taking us across the river. Another unchanged feature is the misery and frustration of people trying to cross between Syria and Iraq to escape violence and poverty. I saw a distraught woman and her children evicted from the boat because just one letter was wrong in the documents she needed to cross. “I have been waiting three days on the river bank,” she said in a voice of anguish as her bundles of belongings were tumbled back onto the rough concrete jetty.


Many Syrian Kurds I met were jubilant because their forces had just captured Mount Abdulaziz, a 25-mile long mountain that will protect their enclave from Isis fighters to the south. Jazira is the largest of three Syrian Kurdish cantons strung along the Turkish border which are collectively known as Rojava. Kurdish militia (YPG) are fighting to link the Jazira enclave with that at Kobani, the target of the historic 134-day-long siege by Isis.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-syria-the-kurdish-enclave-still-resisting-the-tyranny-of-president-assad-and-militant-fighters-10279593.html



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