Treatise on the Formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation

Treatise on the Formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation

Preamble

Arabs, Persians (Iranians), Kurds (including Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zaza speakers), Turks, Azeris, Assyrians (Syriacs, Chaldeans, Arameans), Armenians, Circassians, Chechens, Druze, Yazidis, Bedouins, Berbers, Copts, Samaritans, Palestinians, Jews (Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Beta Israel, Karaite), Maronites, Lebanese, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Baháʼís, Alawites, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Turkmens, Baluch, Pashtuns, Lurs, Georgians, Greeks, Roma, Tatars, Shabaks, Mhallami, Dom, Nubians, Fang, Armenians of Cilicia and Anatolia, Kurds of Yazidi and Shafi’i traditions, Assyrian Christians of Nineveh Plain and Tur Abdin, Arab Christians (Melkite, Orthodox, Latin, Maronite), Samaritans of Nablus, Druze of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, Circassian tribes of the Levant, Chechen communities in Jordan and Syria, Jews of Yemenite, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian origin, Baháʼí communities from Iran, Lurs of western Iran, Qashqai and other nomadic tribes of Iran, Baluch of southeastern Iran and Pakistan, Turkmen of Iraq and Syria, Afro-Arabs along the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt, various Bedouin tribes across the Arabian Desert, Aramaic-speaking communities in Syria and Iraq, Mhallami of Turkey and Lebanon, Dom and Romani groups scattered across the Levant, Nubians of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and smaller scattered minorities such as the Talysh, Tats, Kurds of Kermanshah, Guran, and Feyli, Pontic Greeks, Assyrian Catholics, Armenian Catholics, and other historical or nearly extinct groups across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States, and the Caucasus region.

None of us needs to be pro-peace on essentially unjust terms. We are pro-survival. Pro-stability. Pro-living our lives with dignity. We are invested in the possibility that the birth of the Confederation will stop the flow of blood throughout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on extraordinarily little tangible evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what occurred down the Nile, was “progress”. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science, all emanate from our peoples and our lands. Perhaps some of that is valid lore, but today in 2025, we are stuck in a period of perpetual war, state collapse, revolution, and widespread violence accelerated by foreign brokered weapons and aid.

Our many tribes, clans, confessional sects, our many peoples, are people who remember old ways and old customs back thousands of years. Peoples rooted in venerable traditions and lived religions. People who descend from the bloodlines of prophets, visionaries, and visceral authors of the word of God. With our stiff necks and incredible stubbornness to ever relinquish our sense of identity or core beliefs. We all live with memories and tribulations going back several thousand years. But atrocities are escalating, violence is accelerating, and we have gone from civilizational greatness to utter chaos, war, and genocidal practices.

It is not in our interests to keep fighting even if we have no will to make immediate peace. For we have no ability, or perhaps, actual willingness to completely destroy each other. But that assumption weakens each passing year. There have been atrocities in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. There has been over a hundred years of continuous regional war. Between us and outsiders, between us and ourselves. Perhaps were are so wildy diverse as a region it is hard to accept who is ‘our people’, who is ‘a stranger’. Who is of the book, who is of the land, who has always been here, and who migrates, was removed, or came back. We must now find a completely new way to live on our wildly different terms and conditions. For thousands of years, our peoples, very different peoples, gathered at the crossroads of the world. Or were born here in the shifting sands of trade, or warfare, and of revelation. We all traded, we all intermarried, we have all made shifting alliances. We have raided, we have fled, we waged great and small wars. We conquered, converted, pillaged, assimilated, massacred, and made a total fitna of these lands. We have shared blood, overlapped our laguages, prayed one way then prayed another. But none of our differing peoples have killed in the numbers we now kill with weapons from outside our sphere. Weapons, technology, and funding that we have been granted by the great powers, who once sought to control our holy sites, now who seek our oil, our gas, and persue raw hegemony.

This is a treatise co-written by the People of the Book, but also those who came before these books, and after those books, and those who never believed in a religion at all. It is pieced together and translated differently by the Zoroastrians, and the Judeans; by the Persians, by Arabs, and Phoenicians, by the Kurds; by the Palestinians living as citizens in exile or in camps as refugees. By Assyrians and Druze, by Shi’a, by Sunni, by Orthodox and Latin Christians. By Yemenites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Sunni and Shi’a Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Alawites, and Georgians as well. All who wish to see lasting peace, and if not peace, a separation of belligerents, a tempering of state violence, the irons heels of dictators, and a long-term ceasefire. Where the region may trade, heal, and develop ourselves. If not peace, if not better understanding, then trade and normality. Civility in wildly diverse societies. All the people in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow from occurring: “Enough! Ceasefire.” But that must be a building block to confederation; courts, trade agreements, transnational civil service, and collective defense, not dictated or dominated by the foreign policy of the meddling great powers. We must build our long-needed confidence apart. Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our ancestral lands or be in those lands where we are welcomed. Let us confederate and forever defeat the meddling of outside nations that speak of “peace” but trade in arms, and reduce us to all barbarism!” These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful ideas of Western or Eastern peace. An end to all outside invasions. If we cannot pray in the same ways or all speak the same languages, this is no actual impediment to declaring HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags, let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River.

A Regional Framework Defined

The Middle East is a transcontinental region located at the junction of Western Asia and northeastern Africa, generally encompassing the countries that lie between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. Geographically, it typically includes Western Asian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, as well as parts of North Africa, primarily Egypt. Some broader definitions also incorporate Turkey and Iran due to cultural, historical, and geopolitical ties. The region is characterized by its strategic position connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, its arid and semi-arid climates, and its abundance of natural resources, particularly oil and gas reserves, which have made it central to global economic and political affairs.

A broader definition of the Middle East extends beyond the traditional core of Western Asia and northeastern Africa to include Turkey, the South Caucasus states of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the countries of the Maghreb in North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. This expanded conceptualization reflects not only geographical proximity but also historical, cultural, and political connections, including shared experiences of Ottoman and colonial influence, Islamic heritage, and trade networks linking North Africa, the Levant, and the Near East. Under this definition, the Middle East becomes a strategically and culturally diverse region bridging three continents, encompassing a wider array of climates, ethnicities, languages, and religious traditions, and highlighting the interwoven nature of geopolitical, economic, and social dynamics across its extended territory.

If we divide the region into varying confessional or alliance blocks we arrive at:

the Arab League (28 states),
Iranian-led Shi’a Axis, (Iran, Azerbaijan, & cantons within Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen)
the predominantly Sunni Gulf States,
The Maghreb states (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunesia, Morocco, Mauratnaia)
Stateless Kurds (in Turkey, Syria, Iran, & Iraq)
Middle Eastern Christians in varying sects,
Turkey
Israel

In the Middle of what, East of who?

The Ziggurats of the Neolithic age tell a story. Civilization began with the creation of castes and the centralization of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor, chaining early humanity to useful trades, and the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all-powerful oligarchs, and eventually a cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, and later still over since, and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjugation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopotamia. This book is not about insurrection or economic development. It is not a rejection of ethnic identity or the work of atheists. What is clear: the status quo is dangerous to states and people inside them.

It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has experienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody chaos existed a long time before that. In perpetuity for as long as we have known.

Every nation is highly vulnerable; every nation is perhaps also complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes or the competing interpretations of the Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division, but not the cause of it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its own oligarchy, jail its own collaborators, we must cast off foreign domination, cast off ethnic particularism, and embrace peace on its own terms.

It is not fully true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman Empire erupted in Palestine or can be cured from there. Nor can Turkey revive it. Or can Iran dictcate its Shi’a rivalist terms. Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karbala, Najaf, Mecca, Medina, and Tehran are all guarded by the now-flailing American empire. The mulipolar world of rising China and reviving Russia will treat the region in a different, but not necessarily better way.

Not all our original sins of the region began with the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Zionists, with meddling foreigners, and with our oil. Long before the Crusaders attacked from the West and the Mongols came from the East; we fought wars of the Ziggurats. We fought wars of city states. We fought wars against Romans. We fought wars between Sunni and Shi’a. We fought wars between rival Caliphs. We fought wars against unbelievers and true believers of esoteric sects.

The truth is that any so-called peace process is little more than a short-term buy-off if there is no structural framework to actually exist together. Allowing the hegemonic powers (American, the EU, China, and Russia) more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out, and it will run out in the next several hundred years. We cannot and should not seek to perpetuate war on Israel; we should all be seeking to decouple the Jewish state from the foreign policy goals of the West. But also the Muslm states that are Western or Eastern semi-peripheral states; such as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. We should take accountability for what we have done to and with Palestinians as a whole, both as Israeli occupiers and Arab state hosts. We should validate the Kurdish question and acknowledge the rights of 40 million stateless people, who have been massacred, particularly in Iraq and Turkey. We should acknowledge that the Sunni-Shi’a cold war is also quite violent and divisive to the region. We should prevent starvation, human rights violations, and genocide in Palestine, but also in Syria,Yemen,.and Sudan (which is not part of the Middle East but deeply affected by it). In short, we must be accountable for what is the violence inflicted by colonialism/ neocolonialism, and what is the violence we are self-inflicting. Violence baked into the fabric of our poltical consciousness as a region. In Islam, hypocrisy is a high level of contradictory sin; we must take stock of where the fault lies with foreign meddling and where it lies with our own leaders’ violent impulses and failed policies. Yet, the treatise does not reject states. But presupposes they are violent, inefficient, repressive, and prone to Oligarchic capture.

There are many failures of the modern state system. Innumerous failures and predations to indict. But these are the boundaries were working with, the confines of power we are conglamorating if this scheme might proceed, it is a balance of nationalism, an alliance of regional geographies, and has to balance the authoritarian nature of states and armies, with the civil society and constitutional rights entitlements of citizens organized into cantons.

What is a state in the Modern Middle East?

With the exceptions of Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Iran (because they have certain historical permanence or at least longer periods of imagined identity); most states are modern inventions of Sykes-Picciot and nationalisms of convenience. Borders drawn up by foreign powers then codified in over 125 years of basically continuous warfare.

The Ottoman Turkish genocide of the Armenians, carried out by Kurds. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine carried out by Israelis. The Iraqi genocide of the Kurds carried by Saddam’s forces. The war between Iraq and Iran. The ISIS genocide on the Yazidis.

The Yemen civil war, the Lebanese Civil War, the Syrian Civil War, the Libyan Civil War.

The most deadly engagements fought between Jews and Arabs, Christian Lebanese and Muslim Lebanese, Shi’a Iran against Sunni and Shi’a Iraq, the war between Turks and Kurds, the modern conflagrations in Algeria, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The spill over of these wars, into Sudan and Afghanistan.

What is Federalism is the Modern Middle East?

It is to allow states greater regional autonomy in their governance by allowing for sub-unit/provincial governments where federal states can have their own civil administration, state laws, and state self-defense in the form of national guards.

In the Middle Eastern context, federalism refers to a system in which power is divided between a central government and regional authorities, such as provinces, emirates, or autonomous territories. Unlike in Western democracies, where federalism often evolves from voluntary union or constitutional design, in the Middle East it tends to emerge as a conflict-resolution tool—a way to manage deep sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions within states that were often shaped by colonial borders rather than shared identity. Federalism in this region is therefore less about political philosophy and more about pragmatic power-sharing in fragile or post-conflict societies.

Historically, most Middle Eastern states developed under highly centralized, often authoritarian governments that concentrated power in the capital. This structure marginalized peripheral regions and minority groups, fueling recurring tensions. When these centralized states fractured—through wars, revolutions, or foreign interventions—federalism was sometimes proposed as a way to preserve unity while granting autonomy. The most prominent example is Iraq, which adopted a federal constitution after 2003 that recognized the Kurdistan Regional Government as an autonomous entity within a single Iraqi state. This arrangement sought to balance power among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, though it remains contentious. Another example is the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates that maintains stability through monarchical power-sharing rather than democracy—making it a rare case of successful, non-democratic federalism. Proposals for federal systems have also appeared in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where decentralization has been discussed as a means to end prolonged civil wars, though these plans have yet to take hold.

Despite its appeal as a peace mechanism, federalism in the Middle East faces major obstacles. Deep sectarian mistrust, weak institutions, and the enduring culture of centralized authority make it difficult to implement effectively. Many political elites fear that federalism will lead to partition, while external powers—such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—often manipulate internal divisions for their own regional agendas. As a result, federalism in the region is frequently perceived as foreign-imposed or a prelude to fragmentation rather than a step toward stable governance.

In essence, Middle Eastern federalism is less an ideological system than a pragmatic survival strategy. It seeks to balance competing identities and distribute power in states where national unity is fragile. While in theory it could promote local governance, accountability, and reduced conflict over resources, in practice it remains a contested and unstable experiment—a reflection of the region’s complex interplay between unity, autonomy, and enduring historical divisions.

What are Cantons?

A means to organize a more localized civil administration in highly diverse societies with a tendency to wage protracted civil wars. Which have come out of the many wars but do not need to wait for a war to form structures. In fact it is more desirable for the existing states to undertake federalism, then to dissolve into further warfare.

Cantons do not have to geographic they can also be communal; the main benefit of canton level sub-organization to the the federalized state is to allow community organization on civil society lines, allow for local decision making on community life, and allow peoples of common affinity to organize their lives on those traditions and values.

For instance, in Lebanon, the idea of cantonization became prominent during the 1975–1990 civil war, when the country effectively split into Christian, Muslim, and Druze-controlled territories. Although the Taif Agreement later re-centralized the state, Lebanon still operates through an informal sectarian power-sharing system that resembles a confessional version of cantonal autonomy. In Syria, after the 2011 uprising, the country fragmented into several zones of control: Kurdish self-governed areas in the north and northeast (often described as “cantons” by their organizers), Assad regime territory, and opposition or Islamist enclaves. The Kurdish-led administration explicitly used the term “cantons” to describe regions like Afrin, Kobane, and Jazira, which were united under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—a model inspired by decentralized and participatory governance rather than ethnic nationalism.

In Iraq, the term is less commonly used, but the reality is similar: the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Shi’a and Sunni-dominated provinces function as quasi-cantons within a weak federal framework. Similarly, in Yemen and Libya, ongoing wars have produced competing governments and territorial zones—effectively cantonized states divided by militia control, tribal loyalty, and external patronage.

Thus, in the Middle East, “cantons” are rarely peaceful administrative entities. They are instead manifestations of state disintegration or attempts to manage diversity through localized autonomy. While some scholars and diplomats propose cantonization as a conflict-resolution mechanism—for example, suggesting a canton-based solution for Syria, Yemen, or Palestine—risks entrenching division, legitimizing warlords, and formalizing partition. In essence, Middle Eastern cantons represent a hybrid between governance and survival, where local communities govern themselves amid the collapse or weakness of the central state.

Middle East (core countries – 20)

MASHRIQ

BILAD AL-SHAM (Egypt & Levant)

Egypt
Lebanon
Syria
Israel
Palestine
Jordan

BILAD AL-RAFIDAIN WA FARIS

Iran
Iraq

KHALIJ (Gulf States)

Bahrain
Kuwait

Oman
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates
Yemen

MAGHREB (Northwest Africa)

Libya
Algeria
Tunisia
Morocco
Mauritania

Total (core Middle East): 20 states

Middle East Semi-Peripheral

Turkey
Iran
Egypt
Israel
Saudi Arabia

Middle East Peripheral

Cyprus
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Armenia
Sudan
Afghanistan

Middle East Non-State Cantons

Kurdistan-Iraq (KRG-Bashur)
Kurdistan-Syria (Rojava)
Houthi Territories-Yemen
Palestine Gaza
Palestine West Bank
Druze in Syria
Hezbollah in Lebanon

= 27 countries total

Egypt, Jordan, and briefly the PLO were all bought off to make an awkward peace with Israel with American development aid dollars. In recent years, the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and, one day soon, Saudi Arabia most likely are paid to recognize Israel because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base.

They use it as a litmus test of their hegemony. Just as the Russians used Syria until its total collapse and still use Iran in some agreed to forms. The Iranians and Israelis have their specific confessional interests, and of course, they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidies, they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such an adventuristic foreign policy. The Israeli military machine is funded by the United States, and the Iranian one (and the Assad regime in Syria before it collapsed) partially by Russia and China, though to the same effect: perpetuating adventuristic and militant regional foreign policy.

The capital inputs for development or military aid allow the Saudi Arabian and UAE to sustain devastating intervention in Yemen. They subsidize Israeli hyper-militarization and the Palestinian occupation, but they also subsidize Hezbollah, Hamas, and Shiite militia forces. It is hard to imagine such horrific localized wars without the foreign powers subsidizing them.

The road between both halves of Jerusalem/Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by the leftist Palestinians and trained to reorganize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these proxies.

Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is actually over 60-70% Palestinian, and without American and Israeli support, could not exist as a country.

So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the linchpin of regional peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say, the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews, as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.

Palestine is an open wound. It is with the latest round of fighting in Gaza evidently a genocide. Over 65,000 people have died so far. It shall be remembered to all that over 4 million have died in Sudan, so far. Over 630,000 were killed in the Syrian Civil War (mostly by the Russian-backed Assad regime), and the war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Houthis has led to the deaths of over 377,000 people, that we know of.

It is a wild deception that the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), Daesh, has its origins in any normally accepted version of Islam. Its goals were allegedly divinely inspired in prophecy. Its defeat will be no means bring an end to this type of Wahabi Salafist insurgency, exported in petro-dollars from the Gulf. ISIS was an entity controlled by, supplied by, and supported by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services. That is one theory, another that was Ba’athist intelligence and varying Al Qaeda offshoots, using messianic fervor and rhetoric. If not for the Coalition forces, particularly the US, the French, the British, the Kurdish SDF, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iraqi PMF, they very well might have conquered the entire Middle East. How close they came is understood only by those who were there on the ground.

It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of all types of foreign power, the meddling of the great powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of our varying theocracies. In short, the road to an actual long-lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews yet again, or doubling down on depper religious zeal and fundamentalisms!

The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units, but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders, particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO-aligned neocrusaders, Russian-aligned neocrusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions, and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil. The Muslim world is obsessively fixated on Palestine because it is an open wound, it is a blatant ongoing human rights violation, a violent occupation, and because it instills a crusader-like, colonial force in our midst that is not fully Western, but also not fully Middle Eastern. As long as Israel has no alignment in culture, trade, and security, it will remain a destabilizing entity. One that, in any projection of isolation, resistance, demographic shift, BDS, international divestment/ shaming, has 200 nuclear missiles. Its Jewish population in religious identity and political imagination is indigenous to the Middle East. Removing it, secularizing it, demilitarizing it, or refusing to deal with it is political imagination. The highest level of human rights and civil rights safeguards one can deliver to Palestinians is an Israel and Palestine fully integrated into the region. The Western media and the Muslim streets obsessively focuses on Palestine because:

It is an open wound with ongoing human rights violations that antagoize and grieve the very heart and soul of the region.

(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish, are at least half European or Slavic in roots and appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi), so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination. Were their no real and imagined Arab enemy the Jews might fight yet another civil war for the soul of thier state. It is deeply baked into Chrisitian theology the Jews must gather again in Israel before their Christian messiah returns. The war in Palestine-Israel is thus deeply and subconsciously understood by Western minds as theological and geostrategic.

(b) Israel is, without a single doubt, is a manifestation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a military colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. There is not a realistic scenario where the Jews will lose a military confrontation. They will not pack up and leave. There is a highly realistic scenario they will lose lose a demographic one. The birthrates of Palestinians already place them above 20% of Israeli passport holders.

It cannot be denied that both the West and East have not been short on Muslim proxy clients. Pahlavi Iran until 1979. The U.S. bases in Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey. Russia once heavily invested in Egypt until it went to America, and also Syria until the Assad regime fell in 2024.

The abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia, as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege, of 8-9 million Israelites, 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders, culminating in the holocaust, the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel, decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by the Romans 1,900 years ago.

The Shi’a also know a great deal about enduring persecutions. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics developed adjacent to the Jews. Particularly, a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. A feeling of a need for a vigilant ethno state. The world’s oldest groups of Christians, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites, have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.

The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward maldevelopment: USA-NATO, the Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).

The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified. Broken into federal units within exisitg states, then administered by canton level governance.

Lebanon- 4 cantons

Sunni
Shi’a
Christian
Druze

Palestine-Israel- 2 cantons

Judean
Palestinian

Jordan-2 cantons

Hashimite
Palestinian

Syria- 4 cantons

Kurdish (SDF)
Sunni Arab
Alawite
Druze

Iraq- 3 cantons

Shi’a Arab
Sunni Arab
Kurdish (PUK/KDP)

Iran- 5 cantons

Shi’a Persian
Azeri
Kurdish
Baloch
Lur

Second Phase

Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan regions.

Gulf States & Saudi Arabia.

For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 200 years old. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years, and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.

Realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned, restore the Palestinians and also the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder, and they, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye, will have to be managed one by one. The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to a hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.

We, the peoples of the Middle East, comprising all peoples listed above and all indigenous communities acknowledge the history of millennia-long coexistence, conflict, trade, and cultural exchange. The region has endured cycles of war, conquest, displacement, and foreign interference. It is the imperative of survival, dignity, and justice that motivates this treatise.

Chapter I: Principles of Survival and Peace

Principle of Non-Annihilation: No party possesses absolute capacity to destroy another; hence, the continuation of conflict is neither inevitable nor desirable.
Principle of Diverse Society: Peoples must establish arrangements permitting ethically and religiously divergent communities to coexist while preserving autonomy, identity, and historical heritage.
Ceasefire Imperative: Immediate cessation of hostilities is mandatory. External actors benefiting from ongoing conflict must be neutralized in policy and practice.

Chapter II: Recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty

All peoples retain sovereignty over ancestral lands or lands where they are received. Their civil, poltical, economic, culturalm and social human rights will be affirmed in the formation of governance cantons in federalized states.
Political and territorial arrangements must respect cultural, ethnic, and religious distinctions.

State boundaries will be altered to reflect demographic realities and avoid further armed conflicts.
State governance will be remodaled to a Federal system of sub units called Cantons, inside Federalized States, bound in a Confederation.

Historical grievances shall not preclude functional coexistence; legal recognition of past injustices shall guide reconciliation mechanisms.

Chapter III: Formation of the Middle Eastern Confederation

Structure: The Confederation shall comprise autonomous cantons existing inside the state frameworks, each preserving ethnic, linguistic, and religious governance within a shared federal framework.
Administrative Capitals: Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
Legal Framework:
- A Federal structure for existing states will be established on regional or confessional lines to propagate the terms of the Confederation.

Cantons can form based on shared ethnicity, religion, or logical geography
Cantons have a civil administration and a series of democratic term based councils that sent delegates to a Federal State level Assembly.
Like an American state with a national guard and its own constitution and taxation powers.
The elected leadership of several cantons form a Federal State Assemby of a geographic unit of the country (nation state).
The nation State will have a unicameral Congress/Parliment/Majalis which in turn elects Confederation level Reprentatives (like representatives to the EU).

The Confederation is a voluntary association of existing states that share a framework of free travel, free trade, triparte taxation, a Confederation wide civil service, and miliary security cooperation agreements.
A referendum of cantons can asl to withdraw from the Confderation obligations
The target goal is ten years to integrate all the miliary forces
Each State wiil adopt a Federal framework transferring certain civil administration and taxation responsibilities to a Canton Administation.
One or several Cantons will comprise a Federal unit of an existing State.
Each State will adopt constitutional amendments enshrining a civil code of the cantons, the availability to seek justice under that code or religious courts
Cantons can propagate a Modal Civic Code with variations for local religious law
Human rights law shall supersede all local or religious law where conflict arises.
Human rights law shall be derived from existing Human right treaties.
Citizens retain the right to relocate between cantons or exit the Confederation entirely by a popular vote.
Cantonal legislation may govern internal religious matters provided compliance with federal legal standards.
A unified supreme judiciary shall arbitrate disputes between cantons and states.

Chapter IV: Governance and Civil Service

Rotational Leadership: Leadership positions across cantons shall rotate to ensure equitable representation.
Civil Institutions: Shared civil services shall administer education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Defense and Security:
- A coordinated defense council shall maintain sovereignty and internal stability.
- Military and police forces shall operate under confederal oversight while respecting cantonal autonomy.
- No foreign powers will be allowed miltarya bases in the region.
- The Confederation will draft an collectively maintain a unified multinational defense force.

Chapter V: Engagement with External Powers

The Confederation shall maintain non-alignment with foreign powers.
No external power shall dictate domestic policy, supply advanced weaponry, or manipulate regional conflicts.
Strategic self-reliance shall be developed in energy, defense, and civil administration.

Chapter VI: Strategic Objectives

Arrest cycles of conflict across the region through structured separation and collaboration.

Priorities include pacficiaiton of protradcted conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya, & Israel-Palestine

Secure survival and autonomy of all indigenous peoples.
Establish a legally binding and historically informed framework for peace and cooperation through a regiona Human Rights Court.
Prepare for post-conflict sustainability: energy, economic stability, and civil resilience.

Chapter VII: Immediate Measures

Initiate a region-wide ceasefire framework within six months.
Convene representatives from all states, militai, cantons, and indigenous communities to formalize governance structures.
Draft a constitution codifying rights, responsibilities, and federal oversight.
Establish mechanisms for dispute resolution and conflict prevention.

FRAMEWORK
This treatise is not a theoretical abstraction. It is a practical, legally grounded roadmap for survival, dignity, and justice in the Middle East. It acknowledges history, respects diversity, and insists on immediate action. The formation of a Middle Eastern Confederation is the sole viable mechanism to halt ongoing cycles of destruction and secure the future of its peoples.

A confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development, intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Arabs, Persian, Judeans and all of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”

The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that, through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.

There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.

Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.

Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.

This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.

For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.

Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.

There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.

Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.

“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”

Between October 7^{th, 2023,} and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.

Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael³ which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.

“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”

In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.

This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna⁴. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something much more powerful.

To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.

Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah⁵ cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.

There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary⁶. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian⁷) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives⁸. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians⁹. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.

Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.

Then in under two years the Jewish State killed over 70,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7^th of 1,200 Israelis.

Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).

The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.

“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is an ever-narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”

“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”

By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief.

The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO aligned crusaders, Russian aligned crusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.

The academia, the media, and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because:

(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi) so aesthetically it triggers the latent crusader imagination.

(b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelites: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans 1,900 years ago.

The Shi’a also knows a great deal about enduring persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics like the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.

Thus, an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye will be managed one by one.

The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.

The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).

The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.

For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 100 years. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.

The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.

So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.

“Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”

The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.

Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.

For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.

There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.

“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”

There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary⁶. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian⁷) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives⁸. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians⁹. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.

Then in under a year the Jewish State killed over 75,000 Palestinians in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7^th of 1,200 Israelis.

Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).

The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.

“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”

“We are going to use thin, durable, and yet fully understandable code.” We are going to use metaphors inside the allegories. We will fight on the low roads and high roads and from the mountains. We will not contradict myths or religious tenets; we will not offer science as a new kind of positivist God. “We call on all patriots to mount a defense of our realm. The barbarians are not just inside the gates; they have taken over most of our states and their governments.”

November 10, 2025 0

MEC-A-1-S-XXIV

SCENE (XXIV)

الأراضي التي يسيطر عليها تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية

Raqqa City, ISIS Controlled Territory, former Syria, 2016 ce

There remains an undisputed fact that from around the world many devout Muslims answered the call to raise the black flag and resurrect the caliphate. Some were devout and mentally ill, some devout and highly blood thirsty. Some were adventurers masquerading in devotion to a cause. Thus recounts the highly devout and sometimes decapitation look away prone mujahadeen Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris. One of the over 45,000-50,000, maybe even 100,000 Sunni Muslim international volunteers to arrive in support of the Islamic State. The majority crossing from Turkey. Many with their families.

The City of Raqqa at the height of the S.D.F. Counter-Offensive had around half a million people living in it and under it. Raqqah was re-developed by the Assad regime as one enormous bunker complex, a fallback base for the regime if Damascus fell. Which it nearly did. The capture of either Baghdad or Damascus, historic centers of Islam would have triggered in the global Muslim community a surge of foreign fighters. It would have subconsciously triggered a mighty unstoppable influx of support.

ABU IDRIS

My name is Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris, or ‘Shamil Basayev’ as my name of the war. I’m named after a famous Chechen Mujahideen, freedom fighter killed in the liberation and resistance wars that happened in the Caucuses between 1994 and 2004. He was killed in an airstrike to his phone in 2006. I am Syrian, but to us Shamil is a real Muslim hero. He took on the Russians after all, the same barbarians we fight now on our southwestern front. Well anyway, the Russians eventually martyred Shamel. Allegedly also they killed 1 in 7 Chechens and raped 1 in 3 of all Chechen women. Which perhaps is why such a large contingent of foreign mujaheddin as Chechens.

“There is a protracted siege now well underway of this Syrian Bunker Citadel, that historically changed hands many times; and it was clearly not going to end well. Not for the attackers, the defenders, or the 200,000 plus people trapped standing in between.”

Not every single so-called ‘Daesh’ is an intimately, innately miserable, and allegedly evil person. Some are also Turkish spies, the mentally ill, bandits, thieves, adventurers, believers or also rapists. Some are on drugs; some are sadists and people with identity crises. Some just wanted to fuck concubines. Or impose themselves upon others. For many of the ten million people who found themselves within the ISIS zone of control, an area around the size of Great Britain; it is in fact a matter of devotion to Islam and the innate desire to restore the Caliphate. It is now the lesser of many evils. That is why in virtually every city that initially encountered ISIS with all but a few exceptions, there was no resistance at all. Many Sunni Arabs or Iraq and Syria just went along with it.

“G-d is Great!”, but his actions are often not understandable! Everywhere on earth the Ummah⁵⁵ was trampled, suffering, crying out for the righteous to stand up to these Crusaders, these Shiite Apostates and their Zionist allies. That is what the Baghdadi Caliphate was set up to achieve. The defeat of the Kafirs and the glorious triumph of Sunni Islam. Real Islam, not the Islam of reformers, collaborationists, idolaters, and innovationists. Embracers of Shirk. The inevitable return of the Mahdi our redeemer. But, things have again completely fallen apart. We’re barely holding on now, surrounded by a united cohort of enemies.” As explained by the Jihadi Abdullah Abu-Idris a Syrian Arab from Medayiin captured and interrogated during the gruesome 9-month battle for Raqqah City.

“At the height of the Caliphate following the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Abu as Salem, in 200 years our Ummah stretched from Spain to Indonesia, from the Balkans down to Africa. The Caliphate of Baghdadi, well it was allegedly the size of Great Britain, had some 12 million subjects and stretched from just west of Baghdad to just east of Damascus. The largest city, currently completely under siege was Mosul and the administrative capital also completely now surrounded by Kurdish hordes is Ar Raqqah.”

There are barren beige rocky, earth dunes in every direction. Alongside the Euphrates River it is lush and periodically scenic, but less than three kilometers out; dust and despair. Ramadan has begun, but the infidels bombard us day and night. We are in full retreat on all sides.

It is so hot, but of course I remember to make my prayers and keep my faith, because I am a Muslim first and foremost. I submit only to Allah, and I know the road I am on will lead me to paradise either in this world should we be victorious, or in the next should we fall as Martyrs.

There remains a deep vacuum in the depiction of the war to explain the motivation of the 40,000-50,000 estimated Muslim volunteers who crossed the world, infiltrated Iraq & Syria, to defend the radical Caliphate led by Baghdadi. Humanizing these people is essential to making any basic arguments that ISIS had real grievances and framed reality in a way that spoke and speaks to a whole generation of Muslims. However, as complex the span of motives might have been, but 2017 most of them were dead and the coalition had encircled both Mosul and Raqqa City their dual capitals. If a Mahdi was coming, he is extremely late in the game. As rapidly as “the Caliphate” had risen and marched in every direction, its forces were now obliterated. Of course, it was this hardcore of foreign fighters that held out the longest, with their families, with nowhere to run or hide.

Now, we fight the Russians and Hezbollah from the South and the Kurds from the North. In Mosul, the Shiites surround us. The American airstrikes have completely tilted the battlefield against us.

There are not that many of us left. Perhaps 5,000 fighters, in the beginning it seemed we were sanctified and invisible, mujahedeen arriving from around the world. There is a distinctive dread of impending defeat. The Kafirs⁵⁶ have bombed all out cities and given weapons to the Kurds and Shi’ites who are our resolute enemies.

“I never got much enthusiasm from a public beheading.” I’m a good Muslim, so I never got down on the excesses happening under the mantle of the Caliphate. I came with my wife and two children from Chechnya. Clearly the Ummah is under attack in every corner of the globe and the Caliphate here was such an obvious form of resistance. The endless be-headings, gruesome public burnings and sex slaves were a little much for me. Over tea, some of us would go so far as to say it was the actual undoing of the entire Islamic State project this very well publicized brutality. Throwing homosexuals off the roof tops, well everyone had a chuckle about it, but really, we should not have televised all that stuff.

Now, Mosul and Raqqa are completely besieged and we’re all going to fight to the death. Raqqah City was rather beautiful once. The Caliphate was nothing like all the slaughter and terrorism on the media, though we made that media, and we made that terrorism. What people will never understand, the Kafrs I mean, is that we all actually want a caliphate. We want women protected in the home. We want non-believers regulated paying the Demi tax⁵⁷. We want alcohol and cigarettes banned. We want mandatory prayer five times a day. It’s Islamic to want these things. The Kurds are all secular communists, so we killed them. The Shi’a are treacherous hypocrites, so we killed them. The Yazidis are devil worshipers, so we massacred them in Sinjar and made their women sex slaves. I didn’t do any of that. I arrived in 2016. It was beginning to crumble apart, but I had faith in the Caliphate. Well of course I still do have faith that the will of Allah is highly complicated, and this grand setback is all part of a larger clash, a cosmic war. Of course, Islam will triumph in the end, because that is what the prophet declared. But, for now, things look bleak.

“I mean, how many generations of Muslims must fall to these crusaders before we restore the true religion of Islam? This is about resistance to the genocide of Muslims. Albeit strange that the leaders live in mansions and drive sports cars. Strange that none of the Imams are very learned. Strange that Turkish and Saudi money is all over the place in rumors, but all the ISIS leaders met in an American prison.”

Frankly, life here is not a lot better or a lot worse that in fascist Russia. I would say that for my family all things are comparable, or were until Raqqah was besieged. Now, I suppose we will all die here at the murderous hands of Kurdish communist armies.

I think it is good to die for Islam, but maybe for the sake of my family we will try and get through the lines and cross down the river to Al-Mayadeen. The last stand against the invading Kurdish army will be in the Deir-Ez-Zor Province, deep in the desert along the Euphrates River valley.

The Western Media dehumanizes Muslims and makes us look fanatical, but after our people are massacred in every single nation on earth and the West declares explicit war on our religion, what exactly is the moderate position? There isn’t one.

I was young when the towers came down, but it was appropriate. The C.I.A. and its Zionist allies have toppled the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. They are remaking the Middle East for the good of Israel and oil corporations. The fact that their alliance against is one of Shiites and Kurds speaks to how they will stop at nothing, arm anyone to destroy Islamic law and governance. The great hypocrites are the Saudis for while they secretly send us money and clerics, they live off the glut of American petroleum trade.

This project, the Caliphate had contradictions of course. But it was popular to many and most under its rule. Sunnis welcomed a protecting force with so much instability in Syria and Iraq. Iraq has fallen to the Persian Kafirs who fight us with Iranian help in Mosul. We are better warriors than the Shi’a or Kurds, but we don’t have air power. This is why we are now losing the war town by town, street by street. I will likely not get out of Raqqah, but I will fight and die with the brothers for the Islamic State. I know that at least for me and my Muslim brothers, this is very historical and important. At least 40,000, maybe far more, of us came to support this, thus it is not the cult of Baghdadi or extremism. It is legitimate and essential to Sunni that this survives, whatever the odds.

I am of course willing to battle the Kafirs to protect true Islam! That is in the Qur’an. That is what Jihad is. War is terrible, the war in Syria is very awful. But we didn’t start the war. The war is a product of the big game between Russia and America. Everyone is clear on that. The Shiites side with Russia because of oil interests and politics. The Kurds side with America, because everyone hates their seditious plans.

Look, I am not so violent! I’m not so “radicalized”. I am against the traffic of sex slaves, the fast cars, and big houses of the nepotistic leadership. I would like to sometimes have a drink or two, sometimes. I had bacon in Russia, it was very tasty. You will never understand why this was important to us, but it was very important to us. For my generation it was almost cataclysmic. As if the Prophet himself might show up any day now. But in the end, he did not. And the coalition airstrikes took their bloody toll. The waves of Kurdish fighters ground down out defenses. Though I will meet a martyr’s death out here, I must say that the Caliphate and the rise of ISIS was enthralling to all the billion or more believers. Everywhere on earth Muslims are being massacred. Everywhere we are impoverished and abused. If like others I had sat this all out and watched, it on a TV screen, I would not have lived up to my own beliefs about Allah and my faith and my religion.

Later on, they beat me badly for many days. Then eventually I was executed in a ditch. I cannot really confirm or deny that there were any virgins where I went because I do not want to upset any of the tens of thousands of Islamic martyrs who resisted the Kurdish infidels, Shiite apostates, and Western Crusader forces. But when I died, I was just dead, with no bells, whistles, virgins, or rivers of milk, or of red wine. The only virgins were the Kurdish and Yazidi girls they all abused. And death came to most of us ether from the American planes above, or the pickup trucks of light infantry fighting under the banner of Abdullah Ocalan.

As of now in 2025, nearly 10,000 ISIS fighters are in custody with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeast Syria. This includes approximately 5,000 Syrian fighters, 3,000 Iraqi fighters, and 2,000 foreign fighters. Additionally, there are about 60,000 mostly women and children in concentration camps under the care of the SDF.

September 29, 2025 0

MEC-A-1-S-XXII

S C E N E (XXII)

The Academy at Mt. Qerechow,

Rojava-Syria, 2017-ce

Mount Karachok, near Derik — Northern Syria

The mountain was quiet that morning. Wind moved through the scrub and the olive groves in small, reverent gestures. A battered radio played a folk song in the kitchen of the outpost — the voice of a woman long dead, singing about apricots and exile. The fighters of the YPJ and YPG sat cross-legged on sandbags, smoking thin cigarettes, pouring tea into tin cups gone black with soot. Sarya, a woman of thirty-four, watched the sunrise with suspicion. Her eyes were hard, dark, cracked at the edges like drought land. She had fought at Raqqa, at Ras al-Ayn, at Sinjar. She didn’t smile anymore. She sharpened her bayonet out of habit, not need.

The radio signal broke at 05:16.

The first indication was not sound but absence — the birds stopped chirping. Then came the whistle. Not a missile yet. The jets — F-16s, likely from Incirlik — streaked overhead like gods with no face. By the time the fighters looked up, it was too late.

The first missile struck the communications tower. The sky turned white.

The second struck the armory. That was when the bodies began to fall.

Sarya was thrown backward by the blast wave. When she stood, her ears were full of cotton and the ground was singing. Smoke poured from what had once been the command hut. She could hear nothing but a high, constant ringing and her own heartbeat. She stepped over a corpse she didn’t recognize — it had no face. A girl with braids screamed for her leg, which was somewhere she could not see.

Another missile came, this one guided by heat. It found the generator station and split it open like fruit. Flames crawled up the cliffside. The olive grove lit like parchment. The air was thick with gunpowder, cordite, burned hair.

They fired back, of course — a Soviet-era anti-air battery that hadn’t worked since Afrin. It exploded after two minutes of trying.

Some ran for the tunnels. Some didn’t make it. Some simply lay down, face to the sky, and waited.

By 05:43, Mount Karachok was a crater.

The Turkish warplanes circled once more, as if admiring their work, then vanished east into the horizon, toward the steel dawn over Mardin. The silence that followed was unnatural. Not peace — just absence. Sarya found the radio again. It was melted. She sat down amid the rubble and lit another cigarette with shaking hands. The wind carried ash across the stones. Far below, in the villages, no one moved. They had heard the metal birds and knew better than to look up.

She smoked, and waited for orders. There were none.

***

Jansher is a mustached bear of a man, clad in a forest green multicam uniform gesticulating all his lessons with his animated hands. He is the Georgian born Kadro entrusted with ideological training of incoming foreign fighters aiding the revolution in Rojava. “A few hours ago, the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow.”

Eighteen Hevals perished then and there in the barrage, some of them newly arrived foreign volunteers. Five Peshmerga also died in the strikes. They were visiting us for tea. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.

JANSHER

“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being streamed live. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.

“We came down from the mountains in convoys of pickup trucks, semi-armored school buses and on foot. We moved in fearless columns, committing perhaps half of our remaining beleaguered armed forces. Tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children were huddling helplessly and exposed in the Shengal mountains. Without our intervention all their men would have been massacred and their women sold off in markets. In Kobane around this same time Daesh has surrounded our Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters and were on the verge of wiping us off the ground in North Syria. At that time ISIS was 30 miles from Baghdad and 100 miles from Damascus. Everyday hundreds of foreign fanatics joined them. Entering easily with the help of the Turkish state.”

“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”

Sometimes we changed out of our baggy green guerrilla uniforms into those of local forces or simply took the uniform off. Without the Party, without the People’s Defense Forces which bolstered every Y.P.G./Y.P.J. position there would have been no one for the Americans to arm as it would have all been Islamic State territory.

It is possible that the P.K.K., the Kurdistan Workers Party did some very nasty things internally and externally during its forty-year war with the Turkish State. Certainly, there were both internal purges of real and imagined counter revolutionaries as well as deliberate attacks on civilians, but war is war, and war is very brutal on absolutely everyone.

The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.

The P.K.K. got openly involved in the fight against ISIS first in Kobane and then in Sinjar. It can be said in unambiguous terms that without the leadership of the Party, assisted by coalition air power the revolution in Rojava would not have survived the Islamic State onslaught. Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison since 1999.

A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to be made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt; Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership, the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.

The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is extraordinarily little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces⁵¹ of the P.K.K., most of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.

In the insurrection against the Turkish State which began in this phase in 1984, over 50,000 people died and most of them were Kurds. If nasty, brutal violent things such as burying people alive, executing busloads of Turkish civil servants, carrying out suicide bombings, periodically purging the ranks of real or accused counter revolutionaries.

But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces⁵² we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist⁵³ virus. By no means will this war be over any time soon.

By year 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There are acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. No one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.

The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals. They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, except for Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which the Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.

No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settles that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people, will be allowed to survive. But for now, the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings, buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.

Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes:

JANSHER

“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, bombard, capture, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.” Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best to repeat myself repeatedly to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.

Within the Kurdish movement there is a tendency to imbibe a rather endless amount of black tea. A tendency to have poor sleeping habits. A tendency to chain smoke. But they also light their own cigarettes. To let another light your cigarette is ideologically suspect. Sometimes, the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.

“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25^th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. They need to be platformed, as we say. Bad standing means re-education, prolonged isolation, or indefinite detention. Eventually, if nothing else seems to work, it means a bullet and an unmarked grave. We are not fucking around. There is a revolution to defend. When this is over, every sacrifice, every shahid will have allowed the birth of a new world from the ashes of the old. But if we fail, there is more at stake than the deliverance of Kurdish national autonomy. There is more at stake than redemption of a flailing old idea about liberty, equality, and democracy. If we survive in the coming years. If we finally secure the Rojava Revolution so many have died for as martyrs. These ideas will spread like wildfire. If we are vanquished, “human rights” will be buried here with us.

September 29, 2025 0

MEC-A-1-S-11

S C E N E (XI)

سوريا

Green Village Outpost, Syria, 2017ce

Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

***

At the Green Village Outpost contact line our tabor is told to dig in. So, for a few days we helped sandbag and fortify what appear like the accommodations of now long fled oil workers. Something green and modern looking in the bleak oil lands of Der Ez Zor province. An oasis in the wastelands north of the Euphrates. The Turkish Army is coming. For every step Isis takes in retreat, the Turkish state prepares its forces to crush us.

SEBASTIAN ADONAEV

“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips.” Late into the long trips home. I had no home; it was your home only. Only my ugly little flats around the Brooklyn Soviet. Rented in desperation, vulnerability, an admission of poverty. And I will never go back to that humiliating life. I will never see you again, or see Russia, or Cuba, or Mehanata or any other type of slavery life. Your lips and whispers are still lingering Goldy, Goldy. It will forever remain. Now deployed about ten days ago to the Southern front near Omar Fields. Daesh is nearly finished, they say. Assigned first to Tabor Shihad Lawrence, five quickly die by sniper fire and mines in the very first night of the operation. The race to liberate all of Syria’s oil from Isis before the Regime, Russians, and Hezbollah can.

The twenty international volunteers are all drifting in different directions. They, our Kurdish handlers, prefer we not all die at the same time. There are supposedly around 500 international fighters who came to fight in Rojava, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, also Türkiye. But numbers and time to the Kurds mean absolutely nothing. So maybe there are 500, or maybe just 50. “Who knows Heval, who knows!” It is generally believed that in total 500 served and 40-50 remain in the autonomous region.

“Daesh is nearly defeated, but you cannot kill a poisonous idea.” The Islamic State once size of Great Britain at its maximal, poised to take Baghdad and Damascus is reduced to the wastelands of the deep desert and a strong of indefensible towns along the Euphrates River southeast. From the North the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the Western Coalition advance. We are part of that force. On the other side of the Euphrates the Russian Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Syrian Army advance. We all try and not shoot at each other, at least until ISIS is finished. Over the border in Iraq ISIS has been largely crushed; the Shi’a Popular Mobilization Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Pasdaran, and Western advisors and various Special forces have all but driven ISIS from Iraq back to the Syrian border.

The name I have been given is Heval Kawa Zivistan which means “Comrade Black Smith Winter.” I am a Paramedic in civilian life and therefore one of the highest medically trained foreigners in the brigade. Heval Shoresh from Brooklyn, I have known him since childhood. He has a child back in America. I judge him for being here were it really my right to judge other people. But this place and this revolution are irresistible to us both. He is a gardener back home. Here he carries a heavy-duty long-range, high-power rifle called a Dastun which is about twice his size. Hard to aim.

There is Heval Sasson from Austria. He was an EMT who once travelled with his girlfriend all over Africa on a motorcycle. He is quiet, ideological, principled, and socialist in disposition. With also is Scottish Heval Ciya a former British solider. Also, the mad man career criminal kicked out of the French foreign Legion called Heval Shivan, who although he claims he was also a British solider cannot hit a target with an AK to save his reputation. He has not let up for many days talking about the Order of the Knights Templar, talking about the Knights of Malta; actually, engaged in an unending pressure of speech manic diatribe about the new crusades, that we are allegedly in. There’s also Heval Azad from Albania, something of a gypsy, a bespeckeld intellectual; an anarchist of course. There is also a French Legionnaire of enormous size, a giant. He is called Heval Gabar and speaks only of the Legion, revealing nothing of his life. He is not very well liked by the other internationals. There is also a young kid who looks not more than 16 but is allegedly 18. His name is allegedly Max. One of the few held back in the Academy because of minor injury. He is dubbed “Heval Maslum”, but everyone just calls him Max. And that is how he introduces himself. He is allegedly from Salem, Oregon. No matter what seems to happen he just repeats, “I don’t care.”

After the 5 Arab conscripts were blown apart the first night, they broke the internationals not smaller groupings. Ciya and Shivan were sent to a YPG Cadro Tabor based on being British military they were sent to the front. Soresh, Maslum, Gabar were merged into an Arab unit and sent to the front. Sasson and I were attached to the Kurdish Red Crescent outpost in the Naqta in Omar Fields. Gabar and Maslum dubbed “pizkereks” or problem makers, were sent to guard a fox hole on the edge of some useless “liberated village”. No one knew where Heval Azad was sent, but Albanians are very tough crafty bunker people.

“He will turn up and be just fine!” Heval Sasson says, ever an Austrian optimist. “But he just as easily could have stepped on a mine and blown off a leg or been hit by sniper bullets. Many of the Internationals that died, it seemed died from stepping where they shouldn’t step, on some mine, or, getting cut down by sniper fire.

***

Then night came and Sasson and I were quartered in a farmhouse. The commander invited us over to the field command for tea. The mood was the war with Daesh was over and very soon we would all be fighting Türkiye in the north and or Assad’s forces right over the river. The Commander is named Heval Azadi. They cycle out the same 50 Kurdish code names for everyone seems like. The commander in very broken English invites us for customary black Tea in one of the many pillow rooms they like to build. Command rooms with wall to floor pillows are par for the course.

“Trump say, no more guns for YPG,” he tells us the SDF is the brand the YPG uses to appear more inclusive, a little less Apoist, a little more not directly in the chain of command of the PKK, but the commanders almost always say YPG or PKK, there’s a lot of little acronyms for small armies out here. The YPG, or the People’s Defense Forces make up 80% of the SDF; the Syrian Democratic Forces. All the best commanders are Turkish Kurds, PKK trained. Some don’t conceal their cross affiliations very seriously, but almost all do not wear the green PKK uniforms, instead wear YPG-SDF cammo. But it in their walk.

“Daesh finished in Iraq. Two towns left,” Azadi tells us.

“Twenty-four little Gundes to take along the river,” he says. A Gunde is Kurdish for a small indefensible village.

“In Moscow, the PKK make a deal with regime,” he says, regime meaning Assad and Syrian Army, “Iran, regime, Russian make deal on autonomy and oil rights.”

We are engaged in an operation to seize Syria’s oil fields, Sasson had explained. There were not many ISIS fighters left after Mosul and Raqqah fell. This is all now about who can take as many oil fields as possible to negotiate the final settlements. This seems to discourage Heval Sasson.

“Really all that is left now, “says Commander, “NUSRA Front and HDS in Idlib.”

“Al Qaeda’s Syrian brand,” Sasson tells me.

“The PKK is making a deal in Moscow; we will end up making terms with Assad. The HDS, the Nusra, the Deash all the Islamist proxies in Idlib, Bab and Jarabulus City they must be eliminated to close the gap.”

“Closing-the-Gap” we learned in the Academy was about pushing through the Islamists into Turkish Hatay Province to gain sea access for Rojava. The Gap also being closing the lines between Afrin and Kobane. Afrin Canton is hard to resupply and will be the first thing the Turks attack.

“As soon as Deash war is over Turkey will attack, you will fight with Turkey?” They all wanted to know that. Would we all stay and fight the second biggest army in NATO?

“Of course we will,” Kawa claims, but Sasson knows suicide is also problematic when they return to their homelands. In fact, it is well known that many of the prior volunteers, of which there were only maybe two thousand over the past ten years; they did not adjust well here or there. But this was an antidote. Some did multiple tours, others died in other foreign lands for lesser causes.

“When Daesh is done there will be no ceasefire. Turkey will attack immediately. 45% of all Syria is now in Rojava. In SDF hands. Türkiye will waste no time,” says Heval Baran from Germany. Baran had set out to join the PKK, but after 6 months on the mountain they sent him to the YPG. The Germans are the best suited of the internationals to adjust to Kadro life, but Baran said simply; “I don’t really want to give up women.” The life of a Kadro is one without any material things, no attachments, not sex no marriage. Life of total dedication to “the struggle”.

We all speculated about “Fighting the Turks near Afrin” while in the Academy. It will be slaughtered. A cadro boasts that “We have peace deals with USA and with Russia maybe also China!” But the dependency on the U.S. airpower is very real.

“The Regime will not ever accept Rojava in any form, it is just too weak to defeat it right now.”

“Russia will never abandon the regime,” someone says in Kurdish.

“It is like America and Israel; you have Syria and Russia. The Regime gives Russian Mediterranean Seaport access; the Regime is only alive because of Russia and Iran.”

“There are many factors. Russian is loyal, America is not. When Daesh is over there will be no more guns, no more air support.”

“How many Western volunteers do you think are still in Rojava,” Sasson asks the commander.

“40, maybe even much less,” the Commander says. “50,000 came to fight for Daesh, over time 2,000 came to help the SDF. 1,500 leftists from Türkiye and 500 from the West. Now, in country still, 50 maybe.” “The airports in Erbil and Slemani are still shut down because of the independence referendum. For now, you are here to stay. Who knows what will happen? PJAK is now fighting in Iran again. Soon more fighting between Iraqi Army and Peshmerga. And Türkiye! They are coming trust me heval.”

Goldy wrote that she might have to marry her rich ugly patron. Polina wrote she is leaving me since I am “on the other side of the planet now” Chanie is “back with Charlie”, so probably I will never hear from her again. Anya Noori, my attaché, sent me some news from Baghdad. “They are arresting Western volunteers without good paperwork coming back from Rojava. Slemani and Erbil airports are down everyone must go out from Baghdad.” But I have good paperwork. I called my parents the other day. An Arab had sold me a Syrian SIM card. They seem proud that I am here. I hope I can hold it together and reach ‘the mountaintop.’ There, if I am open-minded, I will finally understand the truth; in its innermost parts.

Like in my dreams, the “EMT Program of Kurdistan” is just a means to an end. And after thought, the G.C.C. is barely useful or functional any more out here. My so-called state-side partners Andrew, Forti, Jessica, the lawyer Matthew Smith, and Ovid all have defected and left me out here with no help. Can I count on David Smith, Kaveh, Jonah, or Dr. Wagner, probably not or only for a little while?

Everything here is an assault on my senses! Daily, I must learn ideology, discipline, war, Arabic, Kurmanji, keep Sasson and I from stepping on mines, dying in airstrikes, getting enough water. Sasson has said he is willing to help me run the EMT program if only we can get authorization to do so. The Kurds do not believe in time, they do not believe in space, and they do not believe in relying on foreigners. They do seem to believe concurrently in American led coalition airpower.

The others we trained with, the twenty, are all dispersed to different positions. Ten to Afrin and ten to Der Ez Zore. They must choose their own adventures in Rojava. I do hope that Soresh stays alive for the sake of his 6-year-old child and young wife. Ciya and Sasson signed the G.C.C. paperwork, the cover contracts that they will claim later to the government of Austria and Scottland that when they did out here was purely medical. But it’s not so much if they stay 6 months to train in an EMT program; it’s more will the war end to allow the time and space to justify one. It’s impossible to know how far up the mountain any of us will go. Heval Barron was there for almost a year. The German heval said little good or bad about it, he barely says much.

So many ways to die out here. We or most of the 2,000, or 500, or 40 shared a noble goal. Defeat Daesh, defend the Revolution in Rojava. In the meantime, Sasson and I have been training Arab fighters in life saving skills. We try to stay sane. I am sure I will have to use this AK-47 before this is all over. The thought does not bother me, but I do not delight in the thought of any killing.

Today, a villager “gundi” handed me their sick infant, and I listened to its lungs and heart and helped prepare some Pedialyte mix. The child was sick but dehydrated and stable, the Arab comrades keep telling people an American doctor is in the camp. But even in Syria I am still just a paramedic not a doctor at all. So much responsibility is on my shoulders. They all have varying medical issues. Infected toes, rotting death, abdominal pains. I do what I can. The Party purchased me a huge rolling duffle bag of medications and medical supplies. So, we stay as busy as we can.

I daydream and hope Goldy thinks about me more than sometimes, but probably only Chanie does when she is allowed to. Goldy sometimes WhatsApp’s me cute photos and sometimes Anya, the attaché flirts from Baghdad. I have been sending Chanie letters via the U.S. Special Forces were run into coming through the camps. I realize that G-d or no G-d, Abdullah Ocalan is writing about a universal truth. This is the last stand. The last chance we will ever have or get again.

“Deash is all wiped out,” the Commander repeats, “BUT THE TURKISH ARMY IS COMING FOR SURE. To burn all we have built to the ground,” he sighs, “Serkaften, we will fight them too!”

We all have a lot more bleeding left to do no matter what happens. It’s sometimes hard to imagine where the war begins and how it all ends.

September 2, 2025 0

MEC-A1-S8

S C E N E (VIII)

ديريك

Derik City, Syria-Rojava Region-Kurdistan, 2017ce

Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

***

ADONAEV

“It is not that any of us longed to die!”

“It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on one’s feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half-lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives were spent like wallowing serfs and base slaves.”

Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can, bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the “motivation for the fight”.

It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava²⁷. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks, on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged in a very long fight for their right to exist.

How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.

My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs needed to name me too in a way familiar to them, so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then-part-girlfriend, part-confident Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I was deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Shabi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back. The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russians, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah²⁸ to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The so-called Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces” enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.

“After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava. Yet, she did not fall.” We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. At least not in English. This is a story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, over 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of well over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Anna Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin²⁹. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self-serving propaganda plays.

I am not sure exactly what I am supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m very detached from Western thinking, so I don’t know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. The sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly there were many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Heval Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.

So, what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate volunteers. I think it’s brave we went there but I don’t think we changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution had even happened. It is surely not my aim to give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the CIA, MI6³⁰ and the MIT.³¹ have all our names.

HEVAL JANSHER

What is an Ideology?

SECTION (II)

A lecture delivered in Rojava, 2017

“An ideology is a body of theory explaining social, historical, economic and political relationships. Based on the writings of varying social theorists, philosophers and economists ideology establishes a paradigm of reality and change (a rationale for how change comes about in the world), advocates systems of governance (structures of rule both local and international), outlines social policy (specific laws that establish societal norms) and codifies relationships between individuals, societies, corporations, and states. An ideology explains, or tries to explain the chaos in the world of the real.”

“Everyone has some kind of Political Paradigm. Normally established by their parents, early education and religious values, or by the media sources of their state. An ideology is more scientific than a paradigm, more dogmatic than basic learned political values and beliefs. An ideology uses elements of history to establish a narrative. This narrative is then cultivated to introduce new values, new modes of behavior and new ways of understanding reality. By not having an ideology, or paradigm most people become frustrated, and then religious. Which is to say they absolve themselves of this world and imagine justice and peace only in another world, which absolutely no one has come back from to verify.”

“Thus all ideology relies on establishing its own “Subjective Version of History”, its own interpretation of largely unknown previous epochs, current events and future possibilities.”

“Those who control the past, control the future: those who control the present, control the past.”

Eric Blair (George Orwell), British Political Novelist, 1984.

HEVAL JANSHER

“I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, no one can actually say. Americans, you have the easiest deal. After ISIS³² is finished, maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not.”

Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, women’s emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war-torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’³³ the Scotsman always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try to undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G.³⁴ Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You must be little crazy to travel halfway across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O³⁵.
I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’, pronounced” Heval JAN-SHER” the Georgian Y.P.G. guerrilla commander who helped train us that, if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan³⁶. Honors Abdullah Ocalan³⁷ and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East. Speak knowingly in English about the solution process for a beautiful and liberated future time.

JANSHER

“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story! Call it; A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN! Then allude to something grand and wholly revolutionary!”

Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. He probably would never have cursed publicly. As he was living a life of “unlimited modesty”. So, I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdoms shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B.³⁸ Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a footnote in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part, of a part, or something very epic.

JANSHER

“It must be a love story, or they will never make a movie about it, comrade! To the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.”

But he also said things like:

“A ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. Any romantic love, or sexual yearning is a bourgeois luxury. For civilians, actually. A Kadro moves beyond the physical temptations of life, not because they are sinful or weak. They are just weakening to a revolutionary militant. Distracting the focus, one must maintain motivation for our fight”.

“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted that Heval Actor Jake Gyllenhaal was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France.

JANSHER

“But that will likely not go anywhere useful. By the time it comes out we will all be dead, or have achieved victory, actually.” He always punctuates or punctuates his thoughts with “actually”.

JANSHER

You see Heval, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well, that’s no longer completely true. The 600 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin.

These were the kinds of “little talks” we had at the Qerechow Academy. Like a father and son seated on the floor of a small office, in a tiny outpost at the end of the world.

That said, this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig into the south of the Euphrates River. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the southeast in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.

ADONAEV

“Enemies of the revolution on every single side!”

In fulfilling my promises, I will present our little part of the story as the defense has only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to the vastness and hope of it. I worry, no, sadly I expect that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all likely be killed. The Turkish Army will roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t speculation, since it has happened many times before.

“It is said that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians is inevitable to keep the Israeli and Palestinians working classes subjected; but the Turkish genocide of the Armenians and Kurds was/is literally so we do not exist.” Well, the Party put a stop to all those plans.

JANSHER

In fulfilling my obligations as your ideological instructor, not just in the pulling of a trigger or the flinging of a grenade the words of Abdullah Ocalan, from the pages of the Defenses:

Principles of Democratic Confederalism

The right of self-determination of the people includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations which is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles to any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people.

Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation.

Democratic confederalism is based on grass-roots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities. Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies. For a limited space of time, they are both mouthpieces and executive institutions. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local grass-roots institutions.

In the Middle East, democracy cannot be imposed by the capitalist system and its imperial powers which only damage democracy. The propagation of grass-roots democracy is elementary. It is the only approach that can cope with diverse ethnical groups, religions, and class differences. It also goes together well with the traditional confederate structure of the society.

Democratic confederalism in Kurdistan is an anti-nationalist movement as well. It aims at realizing the right of self-defense of the people by the advancement of democracy in all parts of Kurdistan without questioning the existing political borders. Its goal is not the foundation of a Kurdish nation-state. The movement intends to establish federal structures in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq that are open to all Kurds and at the same time form an umbrella confederation for all four parts of Kurdistan.

July 21, 2025 0

MEC-A1-S6

S C E N E (VI)

دير عز الزور

Der Ez-Zor, Syria, 2017ce

Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

***

Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery is found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 people have so far died. “A Revolution in a Civil War.” “A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway”. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you, and the dust gets into absolutely everything.

HEVAL CHIYA¹⁹

In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.

Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.

The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3^rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.

At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.

“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.

Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.

“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland. As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night was lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah²⁰^, the largest rebel-held city, in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well-stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.

In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.

The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh²¹ were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate. 

Very bad intelligence my friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition.  Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river. 

“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.

So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. 
There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim²² commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. 
This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time.
A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won! Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.

“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag.
While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish²³ or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation, and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh²⁴, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros²⁵ being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.

In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil²⁶ probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.

I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Daria”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”

Kawa, the “so-called American”, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I longed for the fight and I got some.

I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once! They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for? Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.

On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made-up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.

“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”

Those three letter affiliations do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.

How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 500 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?

Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name of this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.

July 21, 2025 0

Rise of the MEC, Prelude I

PRELUDE I

اربيل

“ERBIL,” “ARBIL,” “HEWLER,”

BASHUR, IRAQ, 2014ce

***

“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we evidently have ignored it.” My Kalashnikov, out from the trunk of my car, lies on the bar. A sense of grim theatre.

How many Cheta (bandits) (“Deash”) are advancing, closing in form the West on the “world’s longest continually inhabited City”? Could be several thousand, the satellite pictures suggest.

We are at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good looking shall we call it “Dutch journalist?” My new friend and associate, “Abu Hamza”, is a Kurdish patriot from the City of Kirkuk. “Never turn down a fight city”. Now in the hands of the PUK faction of Kurds, but for how long? It has a lot of oil. Also, with us, the last remaining waiter; perhaps a plant from The Party, chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold an important book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The title, the Kurds seems to change the title all the time; the Defenses, the Prison Writings; now the latest edition from Suly; “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation.”

“Total chaos tonight,” says Abu Hamza¹. Whose actual name is Alacan. A sullen serious Kurd in his mid-twenties.

Just outside the city, to the Southwest, in the darkness are gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of unlimited violence. Many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows? Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The horde is at the gates. “Daesh”, “ISIS” is here. The city is understandably in total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.

It is called “Arbil, or Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds. The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well-lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This is a city on the very edge of oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.

The alleged defense of the city will be managed by three factions of Kurdish militia. Two from the Peshmerga; the KDP who control the city and the the PUK several hundred trucked in from Sulaymaniyah. Some number, a few hundred PKK stay behinds will dig in for some guerrilla style hit and run and hold out as they do with little regard for their own safety.

Some number of CIA, how many who know, will involve themselves with directing air strikes around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.

The CIA is coordinating with the KDP and PUK, although many have fled. PUK has just arrived. The PKK is coordinating with the PUK, as they typically do, but not the KDP.

On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed-race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. “If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialize, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.”

“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan.” From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.

ABU HAMZA

The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I took a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.

Abu Hamza looks a little, shall we say, a real fucking dower. Probably calculating just how indefensible the city is, based on how many Peshmerga militia have fled, or will soon flee.

JUSTINE TOMAS FALAFARIAN

“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”

One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of time. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.

From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost must always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So, in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let us try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.

I can only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.

“The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!”

The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of home. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear is of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive is all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.

Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived. We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it is a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It is hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.

We all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also, generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. America is a back-and-forth two-party state, and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war cannot be just about oil at all.

China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas, are the engines of both war and development.

America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.

Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran because of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.

For over 2/3rds of humanity, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.

There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.

The World Wars and Cold War’s brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.

Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.

If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy, nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.

The Middle East has been in flames since 1919, and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.

Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there could not be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.

Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001, and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in four or seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.

ABU HAMZA

“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan².”

Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity; it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development, and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.

It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening “out here in the Middle East”. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.

Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region.

Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.

JUSTINE

There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.

“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter Heval!”

Or the places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.

The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petrol-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.

Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.

ABU HAMZA

There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declared it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of humanity.

Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.

The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.

The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” it. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part utterly hate the United States. The Shi’a have gained the most politically speaking. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.

Sometime around 0300-0400 there were mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the Hord, the incursion advancing. Followed by endless bombardments of death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outermost ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had completely fled for their lives. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes, Erbil would have fallen to Daesh in mere hours.

July 20, 2025 0

MEC-SCENE XXXII

SCENE XXXII

Kobani (Ayn al-Arab),

Rojava Region, Northern Syria, 2014ce

***

Kobani—also known as Ayn al-Arab—lies to the east of the Euphrates River.

The town had grown up around a 1912 train station built as a stop on the Ottoman Empire’s Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. The city was largely home to Armenians and Kurds and had a population of about 45,000 when Syria’s civil war began in 2011.

In July 2012, Kurdish forces in the Y.P.G./Y.P.J./P.K.K. took over protection of the city of Kobani and all the districts around it.

“Kobani holds a strategic position on the border with Turkey. From Kobani in the West, past Sinjar and toward Erbil in the East, lies a corridor of oil pipelines and refineries. ISIS was tapping the oil for more than $2 million per day in revenue. Control of Kobani would help solidify ISIS control of Syria’s oil fields. Locking down that revenue was part of the goal for creating the ISIS caliphate Under ISIS control, Kobani would also be a haven for recruits going south to fight in Iraq. Already over 50,000 had crossed in. The Battle of Kobani, also known as the Siege of Kobani, stands as a pivotal moment in the ongoing struggle for Kurdish autonomy and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). From the Kurdish perspective, it represents a testament to their resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to defend their land against tyranny and extremism.”

Kobani, a predominantly Kurdish town in northern Syria, found itself thrust into the international spotlight in 2014 as ISIS militants launched a brutal assault on the city. What ensued was a grueling battle that would come to symbolize the broader struggle against ISIS and the Kurdish people’s fight for survival.

On Sept. 16, ISIS forces seized a key bridge over the Euphrates. A drive with tanks and artillery captured small villages and brought ISIS to within 10 kilometers of Kobani by Sept. 20. Soon artillery fire was falling into the city. Turkey counted 130,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees streaming across the border four days later.

Up to 4,000 ISIS fighters were advancing in parts of the city. Countering them was a determined force of fighters, starting with groups of Syrian Kurds. They were soon joined by Peshmerga, official Kurdish forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, and numerous other groups. Kobani’s defenders were in trouble, though. ISIS took an important hill from the YPG—Kurdish militia in Syria—on Sept. 26. The momentum could overwhelm the city. Brazen ISIS forces behaved like an army moving freely, out in the open on the roads and arid terrain.

For the Kurds, Kobani was more than just a strategic location; it was a symbol of their identity and aspirations for self-determination. The town served as a beacon of hope for Kurds everywhere, a bastion of resistance against forces bent on eradicating their culture and way of life. As ISIS forces advanced, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) rallied to defend Kobani, drawing on their guerrilla warfare tactics and fierce determination. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, they refused to yield, vowing to fight to the last breath to protect their homeland.

The battle for Kobani was characterized by intense urban warfare, with ISIS militants employing tactics of terror and brutality in their attempts to capture the city. However, the Kurds, bolstered by their strong sense of solidarity and unity, stood firm, repelling wave after wave of attacks.

The resilience of the Kurdish fighters drew widespread admiration and support from around the world, with volunteers flocking to join the ranks of the YPG and YPJ. Kurdish forces received crucial air support from the US-led coalition, which carried out airstrikes targeting ISIS positions and supply lines.

The battle for Kobani raged on for months, exacting a heavy toll on both sides. The city lay in ruins, its streets littered with the debris of war and the scars of conflict etched into its buildings. Yet, amidst the devastation, the spirit of the Kurdish people remained unbroken. Finally, after months of fierce fighting, the tide began to turn in favor of the Kurds. With the support of coalition airstrikes and reinforcements, they succeeded in driving ISIS militants out of Kobani, dealing a significant blow to the terrorist organization’s ambitions in the region.

The liberation of Kobani was a moment of triumph for the Kurdish people, a testament to their courage, resilience, and unwavering commitment to freedom. It was a victory not just for the residents of Kobani, but for Kurds everywhere who had long yearned for a homeland where they could live in peace and dignity. However, the battle for Kobani also came at a great cost. Thousands of lives were lost, and the city lay in ruins, its infrastructure devastated by the violence. The scars of war would take years to heal, and the memory of those who sacrificed their lives in defense of Kobani would never be forgotten. In the aftermath of the battle, the Kurds faced the daunting task of rebuilding their shattered city and reclaiming their lives. Despite the challenges that lay ahead, they remained steadfast in their determination to build a better future for themselves and future generations.

The Battle of Kobani serves as a powerful reminder of the Kurdish people’s resilience in the face of adversity and their unwavering commitment to freedom and justice. It is a chapter in their long and tumultuous history that will be remembered for generations to come, a testament to the indomitable spirit of a people who refuse to be silenced or oppressed.

***

The streets of Kobani were a labyrinth of destruction and defiance, where every corner held the echoes of a city once vibrant, now scarred by the relentless onslaught of war. Islamic State militants had laid siege to this Kurdish town for months, seeking to crush its spirit and claim it as their own. But the Kurds, fierce and determined, had refused to yield.

Amidst the rubble-strewn alleys and crumbling buildings, a small group of Kurdish fighters moved with calculated precision. They were led by Baran, a seasoned commander with weathered features that spoke of countless battles fought and survived. His eyes, steely and unwavering, scanned the horizon as he led his comrades towards a strategic position overlooking a key intersection. Suddenly, the crackle of gunfire erupted from a nearby building. Baran instinctively signaled his team to take cover, their movements fluid and practiced. Bullets whizzed overhead, kicking up debris and sending puffs of dust into the air. The staccato rhythm of AK-47s mingled with the shouts of militants, their voices laced with fanaticism and hatred.

“Keep it low! Return the fire!” Baran barks, his voice cutting through the chaos. His fighters responded with disciplined bursts of gunfire, aiming for the flashes of movement behind makeshift barricades. The air fills with the acrid scent of gunpowder as the skirmish intensifies.

Across the street, a group of Islamic State fighters sought to advance, using burnt-out vehicles and crumbling walls as cover. They moved with a deadly efficiency, their intent clear: to overrun the Kurdish position and tighten the noose around their defenses.

Baran gritted his teeth, his mind racing with tactics honed through years of guerrilla warfare. He gestured to one of his fighters, a young woman named Leyla, her braided hair peeking out from under a worn-out keffiyeh. “Leyla, cover our flank. Hassan, suppress their fire!”

Without hesitation, Leyla sprinted towards a nearby building, her movements swift and silent. She took up position on the second floor, peering through a shattered window. Below, she could see the militants’ movements, their black flags fluttering in the wind like ominous shadows.

Taking careful aim, Leyla squeezed the trigger of her rifle, sending precise shots towards the advancing fighters. One militant fell with a cry, clutching his leg in agony. The others scrambled for cover, momentarily disrupted by the sudden onslaught from an unexpected angle. Meanwhile, Hassan unleashed a torrent of bullets towards the militants’ position, forcing them to keep their heads down and buy precious moments for his comrades to reposition and regroup. But the lull in the gunfire was short-lived. With a renewed fervor, the Islamic State fighters launched a counterattack. They surged forward, shouting battle cries that reverberated through the war-torn streets. Baran’s team braced themselves, their hearts pounding with a mixture of adrenaline and determination.

The battle became a deadly dance of tactics and tenacity, each side pushing the other to the brink of exhaustion. The clatter of gunfire mingled with the distant rumble of artillery, a constant reminder of the larger war raging beyond Kobani’s borders.

Baran gritted his teeth as he fired off rounds, his movements fluid and precise. His mind raced, calculating each move, and anticipating the enemy’s next maneuver. Sweat trickled down his brow, mixing with the dust and grime of battle.

Suddenly, a grenade sailed through the air, landing with a thud amidst Baran’s team. Without hesitation, he shouted a warning, diving for cover as the explosion ripped through the air with a deafening roar. Shrapnel sprayed across the street, sending shards of metal and concrete flying in all directions.

Miraculously, Baran and his fighters emerged unscathed, their ears ringing from the blast. They exchanged quick glances, wordlessly reaffirming their resolve to fight on. Around them, the battlefield lay in tatters—a testament to the ferocity of their resistance and the brutality of their adversaries.

As the smoke cleared and the echoes of gunfire faded into the distance, Baran surveyed the scene with a mix of weariness and grim satisfaction. The Islamic State fighters, their advance stalled and their ranks thinned, began to retreat under the cover of smoke and confusion.

“We hold this ground,” Baran declared, his voice firm despite the fatigue that weighed heavily upon him. His comrades nodded in silent agreement; their faces streaked with sweat and determination.

And so, amidst the ruins of Kobani, where the scars of battle ran deep and the wounds of war were still raw, the Kurdish fighters stood defiant. They had faced the onslaught of the Islamic State with courage and resilience, turning the tide of battle one bullet, one grenade, one hard-won victory at a time.

***

The Siege of Kobanî was launched by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on 13 September 2014, to capture the Kobanî Canton and its main city of Kobanî (also known as Kobanê or Ayn al-Arab) in northern Syria, in the de facto autonomous region of Rojava. By 2nd October 2014, the Islamic State had succeeded in capturing 350 Kurdish villages and towns in the vicinity of Kobanê,generating a wave of some 300,000 Kurdish refugees, who fled across the border into Turkey‘s Şanlıurfa Province. By January 2015, this had risen to 400,000.The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and some Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions (under the Euphrates Volcano joint operations room), Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and American and US-allied Arab militaries airstrikes began to mount a last-minute defense.

For the next 112 days the world watched as the Kurdish forces defended the city street by street-by-street block by block in horrific bloody street fighting. Waves upon waves of Daesh truck bombs blowing young men and women apart. It was believed that the outnumbered and outgunned Free Syrian Army, Peshmerga, Y.P.G. and Y.P.J. were doomed and would be quickly annihilated. The Islamic State advanced with precision and with incredible confidence. In several prongs they attacked Kobane City murdering everyone standing in their way. Some people put them naked in cages, then burned them alive. Some they gang raped, some they scalped, beheaded or others they burned alive in cages.

In the ISIS mythology anyone killed by a female fighter is denied the glory of martyrdom, so they savagely set on any female defenders they captured. In many ways, every horrific thing you might associate with the Syrian Civil War came from the Islamic State, or the Assad Regime and or the Russians. But the brutality Daesh is known for, they recorded it gleefully. They broadcast it freely. They made it sleek for replay in dark corners of the internet. And, on the screens of Western TV.

In a Report by American Air Force analyst Rebecca Grant:

“When the so-called Islamic State set its sights on Kobani, Syria, in mid-September 2014—encircling Kurdish fighters there—then-Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the city couldn’t be saved. As Turkish tank crews watched tensely from across the border, the US Air Force and coalition air power went into action, making supply drops and hitting surrounding ISIS forces with bombs dropped from B-1B bombers.

The 112-day siege proved to be the turning point in America’s commitment to fighting in Syria, and a battle lab for dynamic air and ground tactics.”

Mosul, Iraq, fell to ISIS in June 2014. Three months later, ISIS fighters were battling Iraqi forces less than 25 miles from Baghdad. The fall of either Baghdad or Damascus would have sent a theological signal to an even greater number of foreign volunteers to enlist. At the time of Kobane, it was widely understood by the intelligence community that over 50,000 foreign fighters had joined ISIS. Largely entering through Turkey.

US and coalition airpower intervened, releasing 1,200 weapons in strikes during August and September 2014.

“As you know, this has been an important week for the US and our coalition forces as we began air strikes in Syria,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sept. 26. US and Arab allies carried out 43 air strikes into Syria, he reported.

The first US airstrikes near Kobani began on Sept. 27. Air Force F-15Es struck an ISIS command and control center; a typical target for that phase of the campaign. Also in action were aircraft from the carrier USS George H. W. Bush. For the next two weeks, coalition air strikes continued, but only in small doses. Coalition planners struggled to pinpoint suitable targets and to work with Kobani’s defenders. By Sept. 30, the Pentagon reported 76 airstrikes in Syria, mostly near Kobani.

Washington was in shock. The Intelligence Community and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper “acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” President Barack Obama told “60 Minutes” on Sept. 30, 2014.

Defending Kobani would take a direct US commitment to defeating ISIS in Syria. While US and coalition partners were pledged to chase ISIS out of Iraq, Syrian policy was another matter. Fighting for Kobani meant more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, more air strikes, and forging a relationship with groups of Syrian Kurds as new partners on the ground.

“You can’t defend Kobani, Baghdad, Mosul, Erbil, and Sinjar,” as well as conduct strikes “against the Islamic State in places such as Raqqa, with a limited number of ISR orbits to collect necessary intelligence,” a senior Pentagon official told Kate Brannen of Foreign Policy on Oct. 7.

Although the coalition apportioned air strikes to the beleaguered town, pessimism prevailed. A total of 135 air strikes had been carried out on Kobani targets by Oct. 9. “The US has now struck Kobani more than any other target except the Mosul dam,” Jim Sciutto of CNN tweeted on Oct. 9, 2014.

Still, Washington wavered. The Obama administration had committed publicly and at the United Nations to pursuing ISIS through Iraq. What about Syria

“As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani … you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” Kerry said at a news conference in Washington with Philip Hammond, Britain’s foreign secretary.

“We are trying to deprive ISIS of the overall ability to wage [war], not just in Kobani but throughout Syria and into Iraq,” Kerry added.

“No Can Do” screamed Time magazine’s headline on the prospects of saving Kobani.

“The US has been restricted in its ability to battle ISIS for two reasons: it waited for months before taking action, and then—per Obama’s orders—it decided not to commit any US ground troops to the fight,” Mark Thompson wrote in Time on Oct. 9, 2014. Katherine Wilkens of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace called Kobani “A Kurdish Alamo.”

“In a coalition where most of Washington’s regional partners are primarily focused on regime change in Syria, the jihadist attack on Kobani offers a test case of whether the United States can get its partners to temporarily set aside their other priorities and act effectively against the Islamic State,” Wilkens wrote in an Oct. 10, 2014, piece.

NATO allies such as the Netherlands and Belgium were deploying forces to join the coalition, and France was already in the fight. For the time being, their parliaments had restricted air strikes to territory in Iraq only. Ultimately, Bahrain, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE air forces participated alongside the US providing air support for Kobani.

Airpower was the main tool available. “Just to remind, there’s not going to be a US ground combat role here,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, Pentagon spokesman, said on Oct. 10, 2014. “I’m putting that out very clearly.”

As for airpower, some doubted its effectiveness, given the slipping situation.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen because, again, in the absence of any ground force there, it is going to be difficult just through airpower to prevent ISIS from potentially taking over the town,” then-Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken told NBC News on Oct. 13.

Air strikes were, however, having an effect. The attacks quickly constricted the mobility of ISIS forces. “Before the air strikes happened, they pretty much had free rein,” admitted Kirby. “They don’t have that free rein anymore, because they know we’re watching from the air.”

ISIS forces got better at concealment, according to Kirby.

Two types of air strikes were underway. First was dynamic targeting of what Kirby called “mobile assets on the ground.” These included tanks, command posts, even trucks used in the oil smuggling. Deliberate, pre-planned targeting also went against “fixed targets, a headquarters building, command and control nodes, a finance center, oil refineries.” The idea was to prevent ISIS from consolidating its gains.

However, a sprinkling of strikes wasn’t going to be enough. ISIS forces and tanks advanced closer to the center of Kobani on Oct. 10. A spasm of suicide vehicle bombings followed as ISIS fighters tried to dislodge Kurdish strongpoints.

Both sides were now determined to prevail.

Saudi Arabia joined US fighters and bombers striking ISIS targets southwest of Kobani on Oct. 13.

“Rather than the bombing prompting a tactical retreat” by ISIS units, “they appear to have doubled down in their quest for Kobani,” observed Derek Flood, a journalist who was in Turkey on Oct. 15, 2014. As American air strikes rapidly increased in and around Kobani, ISIS fighters “ushered in reinforcements from their reservoir of recruits in al-Raqqa and Aleppo and ramped up their employment of vehicle-borne suicide bombers,” Flood wrote in the CTC Sentinel, West Point’s counterterrorism journal, in November 2014.

For ISIS, too, this was chosen ground. It clearly mattered to ISIS, Kirby said, “because they kept presenting themselves there and presenting targets.”

In fact, the air strikes put Kobani in the global spotlight. For the US and coalition partners, Kobani was on the verge of becoming a major failure.

Across the border, Turkish tanks lined up to keep a wary watch. Turkish civilians could see the fighting in Kobani from the town of Suruc on their side of the border.

ISIS fighters took over key checkpoints then a key outlying overlooking hill. And then drove the Kurdish defenders out of a key defensible school building. Defeat looks inevitable.

With Kobani nearly defeated, Washington made its move. NATO ally Turkey had entered the anti-ISIS coalition on Oct. 2. Now Turkey agreed to allow resupply to the Kurds to sustain the fight in Kobani. Washington placed its bet on airpower.

On Oct. 20, three USAF C-130s conducted multiple airdrops to resupply Kurdish forces, defending the city. In the airdrops were 24 tons of small arms and ammunition. The airdrops also included 10 tons of medical supplies. Kurdish authorities in Iraq provided the supplies, according to Central Command. As the operation progressed, Operation Inherent Resolve would log over 1.4 million pounds of supplies airdropped from August to December of 2014. From a strategic perspective, there was hope.

“For its campaign against Kobane, [ISIS] has converged en masse for a conventional attack upon a fixed geographic point,” observed Jill Sargent Russell of Kings College London. While ISIS “might momentarily hold an advantage against any concerted defense with effective fire support, they are weak and soft targets,” she pointed out in an Oct. 20, 2014, comment to Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

“Suddenly, the fight for this little-known town took on vast symbolic significance,” wrote Fred Kaplan in Slate on Oct. 31, 2014. “And if ISIS was telling the world that Kobani was a decisive battle along the path to the Islamic State’s victory, then Obama—who’d put American resources and credibility on the line—had little choice but to treat it as a decisive battle as well,” Kaplan assessed.

By early November, ISIS was failing to gain new ground. Four attempts to take a border crossing with Turkey had failed. ISIS called for reinforcements. So did the Kurdish fighters. Backed by steady US and coalition airpower, the Kurdish groups were securing their foothold in Kobani.

ISIS controlled about 60 percent of Kobani as of Nov. 5, 2014. It would prove to be their high-water mark.

The decision to assist Kobani marked a change in the US strategy in Syria. Now the US had to “deliver on helping develop a trained, moderate opposition in Syria that has the requisite leadership and military skills to actually go ahead and defend territory inside Syria,” as Kirby explained at the Pentagon.

What followed was two months of street-by-street fighting. For US airpower, the problem was that ISIS fighters had wrapped themselves around the city and what was left of its civilian population.

It was up to a combination of ISR and battlefield input from the Kurds to outline areas for strikes. As the force on the ground improved tactically, so did its use of airpower. Open supply lines from Turkey also had a significant effect.

US and coalition aircraft striking Kobani faced a long flight from deployed bases. They also had to fly past Syria’s air defenses. Syria’s integrated air defense system usually looked westward, toward Israel, and coalition aircraft operated in the East. Yet the threats were real.

American F-22s in-theater helped quarterback the strike packages. Aircraft such as B-1 bombers, F-15E and F-16 fighters, and others carried electronic warfare systems able to process and jam signals. The B-1s were especially good at dealing with electronic threats.

Dynamic targeting was sharpened during the siege of Kobani. Joint Tactical Air Controllers rarely deployed with the Kurds. Instead, they employed ISR to watch the fight. As targets developed, JTACS did collateral damage estimates and forwarded targeting. Sometimes cell phones were part of the process.

Lt. Gen. John W. Hesterman III, then-commander of US Air Forces Central Command, explained that the vast majority of dynamic targeting strikes were “well away from friendly troops in contact. And we use a multitude of sources to initially ID the enemy and communicate what we see. Then JTACS in operations centers do a collateral damage estimate and then we deconflict friendlies. And when that’s done, a senior officer clears the sortie.”

“You know, the average time for those strikes, by the way, is measured in minutes, not hours, or even halves of hours.”

By far the single largest amount of ordnance pounding ISIS targets in Kobani came from B-1 bombers, which dropped 1,700 precision guided weapons on Kobani during the siege.

“Bones” from the 9th Bomb Squadron at Dyess AFB, Texas, deployed to Qatar in July 2014 expecting six months of long combat overwatch flights to and from Afghanistan’s airspace. They had been used consistently since 2001 to loiter and drop bombs, provide overflights, or simply keep watch. Previously, in Afghanistan, the 9th Bomb Squadron’s B-1 crews found it could take four to five hours to develop and strike a target.

In 2013, they had dropped just 93 bombs in Afghanistan over six months.

At Kobani, the intensity of the fight ratcheted up. “It was a massive shift in rules of engagement,” said Lt. Col. Erick Lord, the 9th BS commander, to Military.com in a January 2018 interview.

In Kobani, “It was just go! Blow everything up,” Lord said.

“It was an urban environment, so there were a lot of buildings,” Maj. Charles Kilchrist told the website.

“We had jets there every single day for 24 hours a day. Along with the F-15E Strike Eagles,” he said.

An F-16 pilot described her missions over Kobani. Especially after night sorties, dawn would break over the deserted town. It looked “like a moonscape,” she said.

One ongoing concern was interference from Syria’s Air Force. This F-16 pilot appreciated how F-22s often just took care of air superiority and let the F-16s concentrate on air-to-groundwork.

Maintaining air patrols over Kobani meant six or more hours on station. Depending on what happened, fighters were often rerouted back into Iraq to refuel.

The F-15s and B-1s would tag each other, handing off targeting coordinates as they rotated in and out for the days-long watch.

“We were just bombing them back, and back, and back … to the West, and [ISIS] would try to sneak around to the South, and then we would see them, and … it was just a huge battle,” Kilchrist said.

On the ground, the arrival of Iraqi Kurd Peshmerga troops brought forces with experience in coordinating US air strikes.

“There were times we were bombing across the street, and as soon as the weapons were going off, they are charging into the rubble to take out what’s left and move forward that line of troops to the next block,” one B-1 pilot told Air Force Times. “It’s an amazing job the [Kurdish forces] did and how they are, more so than air- power, critical to victory in Kobani.”

The B-1s went Winchester—dropping their entire bomb load in one mission—a total of 31 times in the fight for Kobani. That was a credit to smooth air-ground coordination. Typically, crews would release weapons on individual targets throughout several hours.

“The more they [ISIS] try to act like an army … they just reinforce failure, and we kill them at a very great rate,” concluded Hesterman.

“They were very willing to impale themselves on that city,” one B-1 crew member told Air Force Times.

On Jan. 19, 2015, Kurdish YPG fighters stormed Mistanour Hill. Kobani was declared fully liberated about a week later.

The transcript continues:

“The “air strikes helped a lot. It helped when we had a reliable partner on the ground in there who could help us fine-tune those strikes,” Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon on Jan. 27.

Kobani was a significant defeat for ISIS. It lost personnel, territory, and its command-and-control safe haven. The ISIS plan to mass and exert military force over the city fell apart.

CNN reported ISIS fighters withdrew from Kobani because “we no longer had places to hold there,” an ISIS fighter said. “We were inside Ayn al-Arab and we occupied more than 70 percent, but the air strikes did not leave any building standing, they destroyed everything.” The targets even included motorcycles; he added.

Also in late January, Hagel announced the US would begin to train and arm Syrian opposition forces. The success of combining Kurd ground forces and coalition airpower at Kobani had proved the concept.

Then-USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh acknowledged that his service flew about 60 percent of the sorties in the air war against ISIS. However, he shrugged off the credit.

“The DOD approach is not to defeat ISIS from the air. The intent is to inhibit ISIS, to attrition ISIS, to slow ISIS down, to give the ground force time to be trained because the ground force will be required,” Welsh said in a State of the Air Force press conference on Jan. 15, 2015.

Holding Kobani was not the end of the ISIS fight. It took a huge acceleration of air strikes from 2015 through 2017 to secure Iraq and bottle up the worst of ISIS. The weapons release count for Operation Inherent Resolve reached 106,808 at the end of 2017.

However, at Kobani, airpower again stepped in as the workable option in a foreign policy crisis, with lives on the line and the world watching. As with Bosnia, Kosovo, and the early days of Afghanistan, allies found their airmen provided a way to fight.

Concluded one B-1 crewman: “I look forward to telling my grandkids that I got to help these people and to defend their homes.”

“On 26 January 2015, the YPG and its allies, backed by the continued US-led airstrikes, began to retake the city, driving ISIS into a steady retreat. The city of Kobanê was fully recaptured on 27 January; however, most of the remaining villages in the Kobanî Canton remained under ISIL control.The YPG and its allies then made rapid advances in rural Kobanî, with ISILS withdrawing 25 km from the city of Kobanî by 2 February.”

“By late April 2015, ISIS had lost almost all of the villages it had captured in the Canton but maintained control of a few dozen villages it seized in the northwestern part of the Raqqa Governorate. In late June 2015, ISS launched a new offensive against the city, killing at least 233 civilians, but were quickly driven back. The battle for Kobanî was considered a turning point in the war against Islamic State and the beginning of official collaboration between the United States of America, the single largest military force on earth and the Kurdistan Workers Party, considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, American and virtually every major country in NATO.”

“This was also the beginning of the PKK-American alliance lacking any other credible ground force to take on ISIS; a leading imperialist hegemon shortly after began training and funding one of the last important leftist guerrilla groups left standing after the cold war, as long as they could work under a front; and the name of that front become the “SYRIAN DEMOCRATIC FORCES.”

By the time the SDF had successfully rebuilt most of the City by December of 2024, the Turkish army was massing for the second battle of Kobani. This time there was no American air support.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

June 19, 2025 0

MEC-AI-XX

S C E N E (XX)

The Academy at Mt. Qerechow,

Rojava-Syria, 2017 ce

***

“A few hours ago, the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow.”

Eighteen Hevals perished then and there in the barrage, some of them newly arrived foreign volunteers. Five Peshmerga also died in the strikes. They were visiting us for tea. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location any safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.

JANSHER

“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being live streamed. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.

“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”

The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.

A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to be made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt, Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.

The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is extraordinarily little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces⁴⁹ of the P.K.K., most of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.

But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces⁵⁰ we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist⁵¹ virus. By no means will this war be over any time soon.

By 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There were acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. No one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.

The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals. They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as a coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, except for Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which the Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.

No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settle that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people will be allowed to survive. But for now, the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.

Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes:

JANSHER

“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.” Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best to repeat myself repeatedly to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.

Sometimes, the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.

“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25^th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. They need to be platformed, as we say. Bad standing means re-education, prolonged isolation, or indefinite detention. Eventually, if nothing else seems to work, it means a bullet and an unmarked grave. We are not fucking around. There is a revolution to defend. When this is over, everything sacrifice, every shahid will have allowed the birth of a new world from the ashes of the old. But if we fail, there is more at stake than the deliverance of a Kurdish national autonomy. There is more at stake than redemption of a flailing old idea about liberty, equality, democracy. If we survive the coming years. If we secure the Rojava Revolution. These ideas will spread like wildfire. If we are vanquished, human rights will be buried with us.

February 3, 2025 0

MEC-A1-S-XV

S C E N E (XV)

TEL AVIV, State of Israel, 2001 ce

***

Friday arrives and I catch the last bus out before sundown and head south. Sundown on Friday is when they shut everything down, everything except parts of Tel Aviv. I need eye candy and attractions. I need to sell some art because I am completely out of cash. It was a two-hour trip to get from Afula to the Boardwalk. That night far out pacing any records set in London. The tiyeled is packed. The strip is lit up brightly. I feel good about getting back to this city. I moved through the crowd impressed with how quickly I’d made my first 200 shekels. This equivalent of nearly $50 was chump change except on a kibbutz. Tel Aviv is geared to be one of the most expensive cities on earth.

I can smell the perfume of the Russian frehhote. Many of the young Russian men had bleached their hair like Eminem. A salsa band was playing, and an Argentinean Jewish woman was dancing and singing through a Madonna mike surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Everyone was clapping to the beat. A group of Arab Israelis was hawking watches, lighters and bootleg L & M smokes from a foldout table. Some rough-edged Romanian hustlers and their friends were taking money off stupid, shit-brained cocky American Yeshiva boys in games of three-card Monty. On the beach I saw the flash of fire poi whirling in the night. The Opera Towers looked huge. I could see a security guard patting down Yemenite Jews because they look Arab while he let the paler Ashkenazim in without any trouble at all.

Canadian Dave who is the bartender over at Mike’s Blues Bar gives me a bunch of flyers to hand out. They take up half the space in my bag. He gives me fifty sheks and a hamburger with frenc fries to hand them all out. I got this gig through a girl I drew on the tiyeled a week ago. There are several big parties tonight. I offload flyers to anyone who will take them at drop spots along the way to the Dolphinarium. The Dolphinarium beach-bar-restaurant complex, which houses a mega club called Pacha. Built near the Dan Hotel where the boardwalk hits the Turkish Fort at Yafo, Jaffa, the old Arab port that was here before the Zionists did all this building. No one I give flyers to will actually go to Mike’s because it’s an Americanized tourist jump-off right next to the American embassy.

It’s 10:40 pm. I make my way to Abulafia for a couple of mini pizzas. Abulafia is a 24-hour bakery that sells mini pizzas and pita soaked in olive oil with zaatar, a green fragrant spice that tastes like Palestinian oregano. The place has non-stop business especially around sunrise when it gets swarmed with club goers on the way home. That is when the fights break out between the Russians and Arabs or the Russians and the Ethiopians. It’s always the Russians and someone else. The owners of Abulafia seem to have a lot of sons and nephews named Muhammad. They do good business. One of them tells me they live in Yafo, the Old City, the Arab Quarter. It was the Arab port of long, long ago. The Yafo-Tel Aviv border is near the Dolphinarium and near a huge Ottoman prison that now apparently houses a sex club called the Dungeon.

***

A man disguised as Orthodox Jew in a cab is approaching the Dolphinarium. He is wearing a club suit and carrying a guitar case that covers a payload of ball bearings and nails. He thinks nervously,

‘It is too heavy. They will notice me as soon as I step from the cab. This vest and jacket are making me sweat.’

He looks out the window. The driver seems nervous. The man doesn’t say much. This is not a situation for small talk. He looks at his watch. It’s 22:53. He observes people strolling on the tiyeled as the cab speeds by. The cab passes the Sheraton Hotel. The man wonders if one day all this will be returned to his people. He wonders when these Jews will be driven back to Hell. It’s 22:57. He takes a deep breath and tries to come to terms with the fact that he will be dead within the hour.

***

Roman is standing outside the Pasha Club in the parking lot talking to his friends. He thinks, ‘Fuck this place. Fuck this place big time.’

Roman is of regular build and is wearing a tight black T-shirt and FOXX jeans. His shoes are polished. There is gel in his hair. He speaks in thickly accented Hebrew. He mixes in Russian words. When he gets angry, he stops speaking Hebrew altogether. He never goes anywhere without his cell phone, which seems to never stop ringing. All his friends are from the Ukraine. They are racially Slavic and technically Jewish, which is to say that they have a Jewish grandparent. This doesn’t change the fact that they go to the Orthodox Church.

This is his third time at the Pasha Club. He wouldn’t normally go to this venue, but the girl his friend has fucking dragged them along. Her friends are Russian origin, and they act like whores when they drink like most Russian girls he knows. One of them is Georgian. Her family is using Israel as a halfway point between the former Soviet Union and the US. Like most of the olim hadashim from that part of the world, they have no intention of staying here too long. Roman hopes his family get their U.S. visas soon because the Arabs are going crazy and he’s about to get drafted into the IDF.

The line is always too long. The Dan Hotel is across the street. Its plaza is large and white. He’s never stayed there, but he imagines it’s rather decent. When he gets to America, he’ll stay in a hotel like that. Or maybe even own one if he works hard.

***

I remember the basic joy of walking in the damp sand by the water with no shoes. Zachariah and Sebastian equate this with happy childhood memories so it’s pleasing to see the body they now share.

I finally break free from the crowd as I get to the end of Jerusalem Beach. I deliberately walk on the sand even if it means no people take flyers. I can see Yaffo in the distance. Compared to Tel Aviv it is ominous and lower key. I’m wearing my khaki pants with the tan button-down work shirt that says Mike on the left breast and has a Drop Kick Murphy patch sewn on the right.

I pass out most of the flyers for Mike’s Blues Bar to groups of arsim and frehhote. They ask me questions in Hebrew or Russian, but I hardly speak either language well enough to know what they are asking me.

I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled pack of Noblisse cigarettes. There are only three left.

***

The waves are crashing against the levy. The rocks extend out into the water, and you can walk along them toward the end, which is as good a place as any to smoke hash. The levy is on the sea side of the Dolphinarium. This section of the Beach is called Tiki Beach. During the day people play Congo drums and an outdoor café serves overpriced beverages with a scenic view. There is a private club next to the Pasha and a barbed wire fence prevents people from climbing from the levy into its outdoor section. House music is blaring from Pasha.

Slightly removed from the chaos, Ze’ev and his friends smoke a joint of tobacco mixed with hash. Ze’ev knows he’s a scumbag. The girl he and his friends had been gang-raping in his car had been left slumped against the rocks down by the water. They had pissed all over her before they left her. They’d slipped her a ‘knock out’ in the last club.

***

The man in the lethal club suit is approaching Target B in the cab. He had three targets to pick from. He had rejected the other two as unsuitable. He thinks, ‘I have never been to this part of the city before.’

He removes his wristwatch and places it into an envelope in the front seat. The envelope already contained his wedding ring, his wallet, and other petty personal effects. The only thing that remains is a small snapshot of his son and roughly 2 pounds of military grade plastic explosives. He begins a silent prayer, ‘My G-d is merciful, and all good things come of it. I will be your sword, my people’s sword against the Zionist dogs who killed my son and stole my land. Amen.’

***

I finally arrive at the Dolphinarium with no flyers to hinder my game and my two-step. Long lines had formed to get into the club. Its clientele are mostly underage Russian immigrants. Dave doesn’t need or want this demographic at his bar, but fuck Dave. What’s twelve dollars and a beer. Absolutely nothing. I should just dump the damn flyers in a trashcan and rattle off some tourist spots I magically hit up.

There are arsim everywhere. The word is sort of like the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd of Israel. A little meaner actually. They are dressed pretty much the same. Tight t-shirts, jeans, hair gel. They all reflect the same mannerisms and mentality. They always give me shit everywhere I go in the country while I’m selling art. My style is way too different for them. When they want me to draw something, it’s always crude and they never pay. They might sit and watch me draw and then wander off like crack heads with ADD. They are the club guys of the Middle East, the socio-economic equivalent to a mix of Jersey Guidos and ghetto Blacks coming to Manhattan clubs with a hard-on and a roofy. They love the ultra violence. Most of them aren’t from Tel Aviv. They just come here for the clubs and the tiyeled. Packs of them will follow groups of girls around propositioning them until a rejection or a hook up or rape. They take Ecstasy. They are offensive to everyone. They frequent bad clubs and get into fights. Not unlike the Jersey Guidos, they thrill me. Racially they tend to be non-Ashkenazi, Romanians, Russians, and the Yemenites who live in Israel’s smaller, rougher cities like Bat Yam, Rehovot, Peta Tikvah, and Pardes Hana. I watch young, stupid people try to get laid after they wait on a long line for a high-priced bottle of poison. The Russian immigrant girls look blazing. They are really loving this whole free market thing and are waiting eagerly to get visas for the US or Canada. In the meantime, they’re made up as hell even when they are only going to the store for laundry detergent.

I see my friend of three weeks, Roman, talking to former Soviet girls. The Israelis are curvier and less made-up. I walk over to give him a pound and he introduces me to several of the girls whose names all end in ‘a.’ They, of course, don’t speak any English. They are maybe Russian but could be from Kazakhstan because they look a little Asian. I have no idea what they are trying to say to me. Roman’s English isn’t too hot either. We mostly communicate through gestures and the occasional sentence or two in Hebrew. He is excited to have ‘an American friend.’ Like most of the Russians I’ve met, I have only the most basic knowledge of who Roman is as a person. I’ve known him for less than three weeks. He was the first person I met in Israel and when I’m in Tel Aviv he always quickly visits to get his lady friends to buy sketches off me. Then we party in broken Hebanglish.

***

Ze’ev wonders what that American asshole is doing here. He remembered how the guy looked at the girl he was with last week when he met them for the first time at his stupid hobo art stand. Ze’ev thinks he dresses like a hobo. I should tell my friend not to let that American hobo into the club. Nobody looked at his girls like that. Ze’ev wasn’t some little punk lookout anymore. He was moving pills and would soon get a piece of Jerusalem beach to milk or bleed.

Ze’ev knows everyone worthwhile in the Tel Aviv club scene. It’s all he’s been doing for the past four years. He gets comped at most of the low-end joints and a few of the mid-end. He’s still too young for the real hot spots. He does not like the niggers so most of the hip-hop venues are out. All the bouncers know he deals and that he’s affiliated so he gets in quick if the spot is Russian.

He wonders why those girls are flirting with the hobo. It’s because he’s American and they want to get to America by using him. It’s the only explanation. His pictures are stupid and communist.

***

The human time bomb steps out of a black cab.

As he surveys the scene, he thinks, ‘I’m so close I can smell them. These Israeli girls smell like whores. It’s the scent of my enemy. They all look so young. I don’t see any soldiers. My lieutenant gave me orders, ‘Take from them their young as they do to us.’ In a few years they’ll all be in the army killing my people anyway. One of those girls is giving me a funny look. They know I’m an Arab and I’m wearing a suit that’s too bulky.’

Quick thoughts race through his head.

He thinks about his son. He thought about his people. He thought about the land that they stole from his people. Someone points at him as he edges near the line. He tugs the ripcord at his sleeve.

“Salwa, I rejoin you,” he whispers to his long dead wife, “Palestine will be redeemed!”

***

I’m chatting up one of the Russian girls when I realized I was out of cigarettes. I told the girl to hold on for a second. I asked Roman if he had one. He told me that he did not. Everyone smokes, but I really want a Noblisse. They all have L&Ms or worse. I didn’t want to stop talking to the Kazak girl, so I asked Roman if I could toss him some loot to buy me a pack. He didn’t pick up the phrase ‘toss him some loot.’ He looked at me like I was crazy.

I look at my watch. 11:31pm. I hopped the barrier and was about to cross into the parking lot. I don’t even know if the kiosk is open across the street. I look back to see if the girl is still. . .

B O O M !

***

Ze’ev is telling his friend about ‘some chick that gave him head on the beach.’ That chick is a 16-year-old that he and three friends raped. She is lying unconscious face down in the sand by the water. He tells them he came all over her

B O O M !

What the fuck was that he wonders. It came from the street by the club entrance. Of course, he knows what it is. This is Israel after all.

***

Roman is on his cell phone. It’s hot as hell here, even in the night. He looks up and sees a quick bright flash before he dies.

B O O M !

***

I’m on my knees half deaf. I hear a terrible ringing in my head, but I can’t hear anything else. There are tiny droplets of blood all over me, but I don’t think any of it’s mine. Dozens of people are screaming, slouched on the ground. Some of them don’t look like much more than bloody bundles of tattered flesh.

There’s blood on the ground and there’s blood in my hair. I don’t really know what to do. I am slumped down facing what was once the outside of a popular nightclub. I reach into my pocket to pull out a smoke and I realize it is the fucking cigarettes that just saved my life.

My first suicide bombing. Saved by a fucking pack of cigarettes. There are a lot of dead bodies less than twenty feet away from me. I see the lights of the paramedic trucks and hear the sirens through the cluttered tunnel of my inner ear. I see people trying to pick themselves up and help the wounded. I’ve never seen so much real blood. Not in real life anyway. Everything I thought I knew about anything was ripped to shreds in a fiery burst of nails, ball bearings, and sharp things flying through the air. Violence looks so cool until you meet him in person. Then he just looks like the Angel of Death.

I try to stand up. I can’t. I am a coward in the face of it all. A part of me is thinking: So that is what a suicide bombing looks like. And another part of me realizes: Holy fuck! I just got all blown up. And another part of me, the part that has my undivided attention, is asking where the fuck our god was tonight!? Twenty-one victims are dead. Most of the dead are teenage girls from the former Soviet Union.

December 4, 2024 0

MEC-A1-S7

S C E N E (VII)

دير عز الزور

Der Ez-Zor, Syria, 2017ce

Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

***

Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.

HEVAL CHIYA¹⁹

In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.

At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.

“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland.

As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah²⁰^, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.

Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition.  Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river. 

Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.

“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag.
While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish²³ or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh²⁴, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros²⁵ being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.

I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”

Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.

I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.

On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.

Those three and letter affiliations, they do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.

How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?

Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.

November 7, 2024 0

MEC-A1-S4

S C E N E (IV)

اربيل

“ERBIL,” “ARBIL,” “HEWLER,” Iraq, 2014ce

***

“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we have ignored it.”

We are at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good looking shall we call it “Dutch journalist?” My new friend and associate, “Abu Hamza”, is a Kurdish patriot from Kirkuk. Also, the last remaining waiter; chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’.

“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza¹³.

Just outside the city, to the Southwest, in the darkness are gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of unlimited violence. Many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows? Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The horde is at the gates. “Daesh”, “ISIS” is here. The city is understandably in a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.

It is called “Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds.

The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well-lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This is a city on the very edge of oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.

The defense of the city, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.

On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed-race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. “If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialize, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.”

“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan.” From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.

ABU HAMZA

The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I took a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.

Abu Hamza looks a little, shall we say, fucking dower. Probably calculating just how indefensible the city is, based on how many Peshmerga militia have fled, or will soon flee.

JUSTINE TOMAS FALAFARIAN

One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.

“The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!”

Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.

Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.

ABU HAMZA

It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.

JUSTINE

“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter Heval!”

ABU HAMZA

There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of humanity.

Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.

Sometime around 0300-0400 there were mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the Hord, the incursion advancing. Followed by death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes Erbil would have fallen to Isis in mere hours.

November 6, 2024 0