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The New Yorker: The Abandoning of Raqqa. Story by Luke Mogelson Photos by Mauricio Lima November 2, 2017

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Mauricio Lima, Metaphor Online, New Yorker , comments closed

An amazing story from The New Yorker. Sometimes I need to share information and literature that is significant in a world of weak news. In a complex world journalists dealing with complex stories are a breath of fresh air. Luke Mogelson worked for The New Yorker Magazine on a story funded by the Pulitzer Centre for crisis reporting. In the video below he explains his involvement. Below is an excerpt from The New Yorker article. 

https://pulitzercenter.org/education/meet-the-journalist-luke-mogelson

In August, in the living room of an abandoned house on the western outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, I met with Rojda Felat, one of four Kurdish commanders overseeing the campaign to wrest the city from the Islamic State, or isis. Wearing fatigues, a beaded head scarf, and turquoise socks, Felat sat cross-legged on the floor, eating a homemade meal that her mother had sent in a plastic container from Qamishli, four hours away, in the northeast of the country. In the kitchen, two young female fighters washed dishes and glanced surreptitiously at Felat with bright-eyed adoration. At forty years old, she affects a passive, stoic expression that transforms startlingly into one of unguarded felicity when she is amused—something that, while we spoke, happened often. She had reason to be in good spirits. Her forces had recently completed an encirclement of Raqqa, and victory appeared to be imminent. The Raqqa offensive, which concluded in mid-October, marks the culmination of a dramatic rise both for Felat and for the Kurdish political movement to which she belongs. For decades, the Syrian state—officially, the Syrian Arab Republic—was hostile to Kurds. Tens of thousands were stripped of citizenship or dispossessed of land; cultural and political gatherings were banned; schools were forbidden to teach the Kurdish language.

Qamishli, Felat’s home town, has long been a center of Kurdish political activity. In 2004, during a soccer match, Arab fans of a visiting team threw stones at Kurds, causing a stampede; a riot ensued, during which Kurds toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father and predecessor of Syria’s current President, Bashar. Government security forces subsequently killed more than thirty Kurds. Amid the crackdown, a new Kurdish opposition group, the Democratic Union Party, organized and recruited clandestinely.

In 2011, when anti-government protests began spreading throughout Syria, Felat was studying Arabic literature at Hasakah University. The daughter of a poor farmer, she’d begun her studies late, “for economic reasons,” she told me. Along with several dozen other students, Felat left the university and returned to Qamishli. Within a week, Felat, who’d harbored ambitions of attending Syria’s national military academy and becoming an Army officer, had joined the Democratic Union Party’s militia, the Y.P.G. After a day of training, she was issued a Kalashnikov.

Felat expected to fight the regime. But, as the anti-government demonstrations evolved into an armed rebellion and insurrections broke out in major cities, Assad withdrew nearly all the troops he had stationed in the predominantly Kurdish north. The Democratic Union Party allowed the regime to maintain control of an airport and of administrative offices in downtown Qamishli. Arab opposition groups decried the arrangement as part of a tacit alliance between Assad and the Kurds. Islamist rebels began launching attacks in northern Syria, and the Y.P.G. went to war against them. “Many Kurdish families brought their daughters to join,” Felat told me. “Many women signed up.” She described her female compatriots as “women who had joined to protect other women” from extremists and their sexist ideologies.

In 1997, the United States added the P.K.K. to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, and two years later the Central Intelligence Agency helped Turkish agents capture Öcalan. Placed in solitary confinement on a prison island off Istanbul, he did what many people would do: he read. He became fascinated by an obscure American political theorist—a Communist turned libertarian socialist named Murray Bookchin. The œuvre of Bookchin, who died in 2006, is vast and dense (a typical title is “The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism”). Öcalan was particularly influenced by Bookchin’s advocacy of “libertarian municipalism”: the proposition that citizens, instead of attempting to change, overthrow, or secede from oppressive capitalist governments, should build confederations of “popular assemblies” that can function as a parallel system within existing states. In 2004, one of Öcalan’s German translators wrote to Bookchin—then eighty-three and bedridden, with osteoarthritis, in Vermont—to inform him that Öcalan was determined to “implement your ideas.” Bookchin confessed to the translator that he wasn’t really familiar with Öcalan. “Thanks to our parochial press, Americans are barely informed about Kurdish affairs,” he wrote.

Öcalan, who remains imprisoned, has published many pamphlets. In 2011, he released “Democratic Confederalism,” in which he repudiates the pursuit of an independent Kurdish state, on the ground that nation-states are inherently repressive, sexist, and complicit in the depravities of “the worldwide capitalist system.” He also discusses the peril of Middle Eastern nations’ being defined by religion or ethnicity. As an alternative, Öcalan suggests creating decentralized networks of community councils, where all “cultural identities can express themselves in local meetings.”

The P.K.K. had always included female guerrillas; the longer Öcalan remained in prison, however, the more preoccupied with feminism he became. In a 2013 manifesto, “Liberating Life,” he writes that “the 5,000-year-old history of civilization is essentially the history of the enslavement of women,” and argues that no genuine political emancipation can happen without first achieving gender equality.

The P.K.K. adapted to Öcalan’s evolving ideas with surprising facility. But over the years many of its members, seeking refuge from the Turkish authorities, decamped to Iraq’s remote Qandil Mountains, where there was little society to revolutionize. Öcalan’s vision seemed destined to remain the utopian fancy of—as Bookchin called himself—“an old radical.” But then the Democratic Union Party came into possession of most of northern Syria.

Photo Mauricio Lima for the New Yorker

Here is the complete story:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/dark-victory-in-raqqa?mbid=nl_Weekly%20103017&CNDID=49339243&spMailingID=12251936&spUserID=MTg2MTUwMzg1NTQ3S0&spJobID=1262631036&spReportId=MTI2MjYzMTAzNgS2