Rojava Dispatch Final: Journey Home

Here is the final installment from the travel diary of "El Errante", an anarchist from the United States who recently visited the Rojava region. This article originally appeared on the Anarchist News website and was also featured on Reddit. 

“Mr. Errante…did you visit Syria?” The US Border Patrol officer stares at me through the bulletproof plastic that separates us. He shifts in his seat. The man wants an answer.

“ Me? Syria? No. No way… too dangerous,” I say. Praying the lie doesn’t show on my face. I’m in Dublin, at US Pre-clearance, almost back to the States and now, it seems, I may have some explaining to do. He scoops up my passport and customs declaration in his right hand and says,” Come this way Mr. Errante. We’re going to search your luggage.” For the first time, during the entire trip, that sickening feeling of real fear rises inside me.

Two days earlier--Paris. A singular morning, fresh sun and breeze, the kind of daybreak that only the Mother of the Revolutions can serve for breakfast. I walk through Père Lachaise Cemetery my head and shoulders hunched forward. I know this old boneyard like a good friend, and there’s one memorial that calls me now. The Mur des Fédérés (the Wall of the Federals). A place on the enclosing wall of the old cemetery where several hundred Communards were taken to be slaughtered by the forces of law and order. The memorial comes into view, a simple plaque on a wall of stone. Nothing more. I pull a YPG flag from my bag and drape it over the memorial. I take a photo. A German man and his daughter walk around the corner. I ask him to take a photo of me and the wall and the flag. As he preps, my hand once again rises, almost unconsciously in the V salute and he snaps a few photos. I am not done. There are two more photos to be taken. One photo with the flag draped over Oscar Wilde’s tomb, and one photo at the sculpted bronze cap that seals Nestor Makhno’s ashes into the Columbarium. Taking the final picture I notice an odd thing, did the likeness of Makhno smile a bit when I placed the YPG flag? Or is it me?

The Border Patrol officer walks me to a holding room in the Pre-Clearance area. I am told to sit on a row of benches. As I sit I see that I am facing a wall of waist high one-way mirrors. In the reflection I can see several officers directly behind me looking at my passport and paper work. They talk quietly and nod.

My mind begins to play smuggler’s games. I go through all the potential contraband in my bags, numerous YPG/J flags, buttons, and patches. A book called Stateless Democracy, TEV-DEM flags, HPC flags and an HPC emblazoned brown uniform vest including two Velcro pockets that exactly fit a Kalashnikov banana clip for 7.62mm X 39 mm bullets. Additionally, several pro-YPG/J, TEV-DEM magazines in scary Daesh-looking Arabic and latinized Kurmanji. Welp, enough there for a few hours of interrogation, maybe even a day or two of detention. One of the Border Patrol officers calls me to his window. I stand, turn, and walk with measured steps to where he motioned me.

After the stroll through Père Lachaise I hail a taxi and head to the hotel. The taxi driver swerves through the Place de la République on our way back to the Left Bank when it catches my eye. A flag; the yellow/red/green flag of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, then two, and then three of them. Finally I see a huge YPG pennant, yellow with red star, as it lazes and hops in the mid-afternoon swirl. I yell at the taxi driver to stop and pay the fare frantically. I hop into traffic on the Rue du Temple and quickly read the sign over the bandstand, “International March against Daesh, For Kobane, For Humanity.” Whooomp, there it is, it’s November 1st--International Kobane Day, and one more time, I am enmeshed in the Revolution.

I walk through the crowd, smelling the food, seeing the colors, transported back to Kobane and Cizere by the sound of spoken Kurmanji, and the feeling of rebirth, of making a new world. There is a tent where representatives of the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (Turkish, HDP) sit, drink tea, and converse. I walk over and introduce myself. I show them some of my photos and posts about Rojava. They speak together, then someone is sent to find a translator fluent in Turkish, French, Kurmanji, and English. After what might be my last glass of Kurdish style tea for a very long time, the translator arrives and we begin to talk about how HDP integrates activities with events in Rojava. As the conversation runs I once again feel it. The openness, the excitement, the lack of fear, the infectious hope in everything these folks do and believe. The. Damned. Hope.

The Border Patrol officer eyeballs me up and down and asks if I have any cigarettes in my bag. I grin and say,” Yup, 15 packs of Gitanes and Gauloises, can’t buy’em in the US anymore, y’know.”

A slight smile crosses his face and he asks about money, gold, anything else I might try to be getting across the border. I answer that I have a few Euros, a few dollars—maybe a total of $100 altogether. No gold, no cheese, nada. He tells me to have a seat while they x-ray my bag. I return to my seat. Only one thought crosses my mind now, did the YPG/J use any paint on those flags that might show up on an x-ray? Oh well, what the hell. I’ll find out soon enough.

As I leave the rally one last sign catches my eye, white on black, and bold, cutting statements in French—demanding victory for the YPG. Well, it’s the folks from the Fédération Anarchiste (FA), come to voice an opinion. I saunter over and introduce myself, they know me a bit, I know them a bit. I am invited back to their info-shop just off the Place de la République. I sit for a while, tell them what I’d seen in Rojava. They ask questions. I have some answers—not many. I walk around their space, buy a few posters, thank them and leave. Now, a short night’s sleep, a long day’s flight, and home.

The Border Patrol officer calls me to his window. I am now frustrated and angry and hope I can hold my tongue. He looks me up and down one last time and says,” Mr. Errante, you can proceed. Your bags will be put back on the plane. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
“No inconvenience at all, really,” I respond. And with that final lie I leave Pre-clearance, feeling very much, sodomized.

At the San Francisco airport I debark the plane and walk slowly toward the bag claim. It’s taken me 26 hours to travel what should have taken 13. My back and legs ache and my head feels like a tree is growing in it. As I round the final corner my compañera appears up ahead. She smiles and we walk quickly to each other. I touch her hand, it is cool and warm, it feels like love. We embrace, I smell her hair, and I whisper,” I made it.”

“Home,” is all she replies. The sound of her voice--dusky, low, familiar— tells me the rest.

(My name is El Errante. My name is Paul Z. Simons. Thanks for reading—hope you enjoyed the Dispatches.)

Rojava Dispatch Four: The Return; 18 Heroes Go Home For The Last Time

Continuing the travel-diary of "El Errante", an anarchist from the United States who is currently travelling in the Rojava region. This article originally appeared on the Anarchist News website. 

“The blood of martyrs never touches the ground.”
--Kurdish Proverb

So I had been kicking around Kobane for a day or two and had made some good contacts in the media center and also the YPG. One afternoon the translator and I had stopped by to see what the YPG were up to; it was quiet, mostly. Then a commander came walking through talking rapidly and pointing. I looked at the translator and he said that the YPG are helping to escort the bodies of 18 YPG/J fighters from Kobane Canton to Cizere Canton for final burial. There was some kind of ceremony that was supposed to happen too. So we saddled up the Hyundai minivan and followed the racing YPG cars to wherever it was they were going.

We landed at a building with an enclosed courtyard near Kobane’s sook. It looked like it must have been a sports club, likely volleyball as it had changing rooms and a volleyball court sized enclosed area (As soccer is to Brazilians, so volleyball is to the Kurds, an obsession, a crazed, fan-driven juggernaut). The building had been expropriated and given to the Institute for the Families of the Martyrs, a revolutionary institution to provide support for folks who lost people in the fighting, and to keep the memories of the martyrs alive. Not that the latter task needs much energy, the photos of martyrs are ubiquitous. They are hung in shop windows, on poles, on the walls of offices, in magazines, in Asayis and YPG outposts, in town squares, in schools; in fact, basically, everywhere. And these posters and what they represent resonate deeply with the Kurds. What is interesting in all this is the anonymous nature of the Martyrs, there aren’t just one or two, or even dozens, there are literally thousands. Sure, some stand out, like Arwin Mirkhan, a young PYJ fighter who with her team was leading the final assault on Mishtehnur hill above Kobane. They were separated from the main assault body and shot up piece meal by Daesh (terrorists) fighters. With all her comrades dead or gravely wounded she resolved not to be taken alive and sold into slavery or beheaded. In the chaos of the final seconds of her life Arwin Mirkhan doused herself with a Molotov cocktail and lit a match.

At the center a hundred people or so have gathered, women sit in one room and men in the other waiting for the arrival of the Cizere delegation to accept the bodies of the dead. It is quiet, my TEV-DEM contact, Mr. Shaif is there and he thanks me for attending. We wait, we talk, we drink tea. An old bus, with windows missing is eased into the courtyard, we wait some more. Finally the Cizere contingent arrives, older men and women, some TEV-DEM, some of the parents and family of the martyrs, some private folks. They are lead into an open room and the certificates for burial and death are passed ceremoniously to them. They accept. There are no tears.

The Kobane and Cizere contingent board the bus, I wheedle a seat for the translator and me. We drive to the Martyrs cemetery, some words are spoken by people representing Kobane thanking Cizere and the sacrifice that the fighters made for the freedom of Kobane. The Cizere contingent affirms their support and commitment to Kobane and the Revolution. The occasion is brief, solemn. More than one mother of a fallen fighter is in the audience, yet it is quiet. There are no tears.

We are now late and the old bus blasts like a rocket back through the dusty streets. The area around the Institute is alive with activity as cars carrying the flag draped coffins of the fallen pass by the gate and people look on from the surrounding streets. I dash around the corner to see what’s happening at the gate to the center. The women have come out of the institute compound and stand chanting on the streets, fingers raised in the V for victory salute. The individual cars carrying the heroes pass the saluting crowd, driven by YPG soldiers who return the V salute. The women chant in both Arabic and Kurmanji, occasionally making the zazi, the uniquely regional feminine ululation, which can be heard piercing the still heavy air.

I look on and without thinking I raise my hand in a V salute, but remain silent. There is no longer seeing or hearing this scene, only feeling it. My throat tightens and I find myself hating and loving in the same moment. Loving these young fighters who died for freedom, real freedom; and hating the fact of their deaths, too young, too brave, too many, and those who killed them—Daesh scum. If I could have killed every Daesh fighter in that moment, I would have. Every. Last. One. I reel in my emotions and look over to the gathered women on my right. Their faces are a blur of sadness, gratitude, and determination. I realize that this wasn’t about the Siege of Kobane, it was about the next, inevitable battle. It was about those who will die, as much as those who have. And there are no tears. Except my own.

Rojava Dispatch Two: The Road To Kobane / The Skeletal City

Today we bring you the latest installment from the travel diary of 'El Errante', an anarchist from the United States who is currently travelling through the Rojava region. This article originally appeared on the Anarchist News website. 

The Road to Kobane/The Skeletal City

By El Errante

It is dark in Kobane, far darker than what you’d expect for a city of 150,000 souls. A few lights wink and crackle out of the encroaching dust and night, and the stillness is broken by the noise of grinding electrical generators and the sound of dumptrucks being filled with rubble and then driving off to one of the dumps outside the city center. It’s almost a year since the siege and there is still no electricity. I am sitting on a porch of the only real hotel in Kobane sipping (yet one more) sweetened tea in a glass. I’m glad I made it from Amuda to here, the road was long, the road was creepy, but now, the road is over.

My driver picked me up at 6am in the morning after a sleepless night at a YPG outpost in Amuda. As I walked out the door a YPG soldier threw me a warm pita. I folded it into quarters and put it into my shoulder bag—something to eat on the way. I left way too early to have breakfast. The guy who picked me up, Salah, was driving one of the ever-present white Hyundai (or Toyota) vans, I crawled in the front and we sped off. It takes four hours to get from Amuda to Kobane, assuming the road’s not closed for any reason.

The scenery was pretty much the same between Amuda and Serekaniye, more villages, hundreds of villages, and fields that were not fallow were filled with cotton and melon.

Between the border with the KRG and Serekaniye there’s very little to indicate that that the Kurdish Autonomous Region is at war with anyone. Once into Serekaniye that impression dissolves rapidly. Large buildings are studded with pockmarks from small arms fire, and here and there one shows signs of being hit by larger ordnance. In fact Serekaniye was one of the side battles fought prior to the Siege of Kobane in November of 2012. It lies directly on the road to Kobane, sits right on the Turkish border, and if it had been taken by al-Nusra (the Islamist terrorists de jour at that point) Kurdish supply lines to Kobane would have been severed. The YPG responded rapidly to the threat and fought viciously, eventually routing the jihadis. The area around Serekaniye is still somewhat contested though final mop up conducted during the spring seems to have ended any military threat of losing the city.

And on the road one can see just how serious the YPG/J and Asayis take the threat—multiple roadblocks and traps are set between Serekaniye and Kobane. The militias have no intention of paying twice for the city of Kobane. At one point we passed a mine that had blown out half the road and eventually were brought to a stop by heavy construction equipment. A rocket had hit the road in the night and it was closed definitely. My driver shrugged, and we set out across a dirt road to go around the obstruction. We had gone about five miles when we encountered an Arab militia checkpoint. Salah pulled up spoke a few words in Arabic and then asked quite clearly, ”YPG?”

To which the response was a headshake and the mumbled acronym in Arabic of some other militia. My driver winced, and we drove on. This is where my nerves started get the best of me and I had him stop and reassure me that it was okay. He shrugged and said, “Syria.” I then knew where we were. In some of the areas of Rojava small enclaves have declared for Syria, this includes the section of Qamishli next to the Turkish border, and evidently the tiny village we were driving through—as evidenced by a Syrian flag floating proudly from a telephone pole. A few more turns and we were back on the road headed to Kobane, passing an Asayis or YPG checkpoint every ten miles. Landmarks I had come to appreciate and look forward to for a variety of reasons.

On the last approach into Kobane from the east you are finally aware that, yes, you are in a war zone. A large ridge of earth has been erected effectively screening the city from approach and every here and there tank traps can be seen jutting out from the sand. Passing this earth wall the city rises up and shows its wounds. Large areas of the outer city have been turned into great dumps of concrete, twisted steel and burned out cars. Then a building catches your eye, it is only half standing and leans oddly against its neighbor; its floors in various states of anti-Euclidean geometry. By the time you come to the city center you encounter whole blocks razed, pounded to rubble, and here and there one sees a building untouched by even small arms fire surrounded by the hulking wrecks of its former neighbors. Luck counts. The streets are dusty, and an occasional water tanker passes in a vain attempt to keep the air breathable. This in combination with the backhoes digging out the wreckage one scoop at a time and the constant movement of heavy trucks as they take the detritus to the growing concrete and steel fields ensures that Kobane is almost always drowning in dust. In fact my first night I walked out at twilight and the city looked more like an impressionist painting by Monet than anything else. Buildings melded into each other in the dust, colors and shapes softened and were lost. A blurred x-ray of a city.

In spite of this people move to Kobane daily, in fact with the cheap real estate—you pay what you can afford—there something of a run on property. As an example an Arab man I spoke to bought a house, complete, for around 15,000 Syrian Pounds ($80 at today’s exchange rate). Not bad.

It’s late, I’m tired and have developed a serious negative attitude towards the Syrian squat toilet. Tomorrow it’s time to look into the issue of revolution, and speak to the residents of this city in the process of slow rebirth.

The Rojava Revolution and Internationalist Solidarity

The following text is an English translation of the introduction to a Rojava solidarity event that was held in Athens, Greece on 24.07.15 by the Anarchist Collective for Combative Proletarian Reconstruction (ASMPA). The text originally appeared on the ASMPA blog. 

Our political collective, ASMPA, took the initiative to organize this event for political briefing and revolutionary solidarity; because there are comrades who have made the decision to join in solidarity the revolutionary struggle that is unfolding now in Rojava. We’ve invited you here so as to directly support the internationalist struggle and to reinforce the future of resistance there, until the victory of the revolution.

Two threads of social liberation struggles meet in Rojava, two threads which begin decades ago. One thread begins in the Lacandon jungle of the Chiapas district in Mexico. In an attempt to reconstruct a guerrilla tradition that never really faded away in that continent, an initially small organization of revolutionaries from a left background had been preparing their onset for a decade, in the context of a directly dialectical relation with the oppressed social base. Through this dialogue, EZLN left statist politics and party centralization behind. By occupying and liberating ground for the benefit of all the oppressed, EZLN planted a seed for social autonomy, which is growing and evolving until today.
 In the years that followed, the struggle in Chiapas was a catalyst in the development of an internationalist, anti-capitalist movement which focused its efforts on the international mobilizations against the summit meetings of interstate directorates. The mass rallying of anti-systemic rage at these international mobilizations, beyond borders and familiar ground, spread once again in history the spirit of rebellion in the metropolises of global capitalism, peaking in Genoa in 2001 and reaching a turning point in Thessaloniki in 2003. However, in these events the revolt gained ground only circumstantially.

The wave of rebellion sparks once again in 2008 from Greece on the occasion of the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos. The character of this explosion is such that it becomes a transitional point towards the diffusion of insurrectionary movements around the globe, which now attempt to bring down regimes, to establish social territory, to put down the roots for revolutionary organization. But at the same time, capitalist powers and new regional authorities exploit the destabilization of regimes, which is a consequence of rebellions, in order to control them. In the mediterranean, in the arabic world, in latin america, but also in the euro-american north, the anti-capitalist movements create social territory ever more dynamically.

And so we arrive in Syria. The state assassination of some children, who dared to make a call to rebellion via the internet, although their call did not receive a direct response, caused the mass mobilization in certain regions of Syria. When the peaceful demonstrations were attacked by the army, an armed insurrection broke out. The weaknesses of the baathist regime, both internal and external, in conjunction with imperialist plans and interstate antagonisms, gave way to both liberationist social efforts as well as to the most inhumane cannibalism, theocracy which serves capital. It was in these circumstances where the armed resistance and the revolutionary project in Rojava unfolded.

The second thread begins there; it is the historical sequence of Kurdish resistance. The armed struggle of Kurdish people against the nationalism of the states that have occupied Kurdistan until today lasted for three decades. Turkey, Iraq and Iran have perpetrated the most extensive genocide since the Nazi holocaust, against the Kurdish communities. Within the Turkish region, Kurdish resistance has withstood the harshest state terrorism and the most widespread displacement by a powerful military regime.

The fall of the socialist block weakened left movements around the globe. However, the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) and its civil guards, neither turned to the rising nationalism, nor resigned from the resistance by abandoning their proletarian base in order to integrate into the onset of state and capital. On the contrary, the Kurdish resistance was radicalized further, it placed its trust on social emancipation and internationalism and so it grew stronger. Following the arrest of PKK’s leader, Abdulah Ocalan, who, let’s remind, was delivered to the American and Turkish secret services by the Greek state under PASOK, and despite the personality cult which was inherent in the Kurdish movement, the resistance not only was not disbanded, but on the contrary it developed its collective structure.

As far as the target is concerned, the struggle gave up the trap of a so called independent state entity, which today can only be established in complete dependence to imperialist plans and which fosters a new class of bosses, as is evident in the paradigm of north Iraq. The demand for national self determination gave way to the direct application of intertribal and interreligious social self direction against state borders. The Kurdish resistance abandoned statist politics, but did not give up its arms and so it made a deeper connection to social movements in Turkey and internationally. Let’s note here the inability of the nationalist Kurdish organizations of Iraq to check the advance of ISIS. While they have the support of powerful states they do not have a strong social base. ISIS was halted in Mosul with the intervention of the civil guards of PYD and PKK.

The revolutionary project in Rojava was born out of the age long Kurdish resistance. In the context of the disintegration of the Syrian state’s control, the organized revolutionaries of Kurdistan took the initiative to call the oppressed residents of Rojava to organize themselves in assemblies, self defense formations and horizontal structures for self management.  Organized revolutionaries strengthen the struggle towards self direction by opening up paths through their participation in social issues. PKK’s and PYD’s contribution to the social revolution in Rojava is a lesson in revolutionary dialectics.

It is illogical to expect that everyone must first acquire revolutionary conscience in order to revolt; such a stance reproduces the widespread isolation, it distances revolutionary ideas from their vital ground, which is the everyday class conflict, and it confuses insurrectionary and revolutionary action with the authoritarian logic. It is disastrous to wait for everyone to organize themselves without the existence of combative initiative, since liberated territory is necessary, in order for the exploited to be reformed into an autonomous social body. Those who place conscience before revolt and above the struggle, adopt a kind of bourgeois metaphysics, idealism, perhaps because they don’t sense the immediate necessity for a revolution.  By intervening in a militant way at every critical point of the class conflict and by liberating ground through the determination of resistance, we can liberate the potential for social emancipation.

The revolution in Rojava sprang up in the midst of a war between powers, in the furnace where societies are pillaged and destroyed. The internationalist revolutionary movement is taking roots whilst facing a dictatorship, imperialist control and theocratic terrorism. In the most brutal circumstances, beyond despair, the common necessity festers and arms itself. Capitalism will not be overcome neither with the maturing of the technological civilization, nor with meticulous planning, but out of the degradation that is caused by the accumulation of power and the inescapable antagonism.

Revolutions break out unpredictably through the vortex of interstate conflict. Paris commune 1871, Russia 1905 and 1917, Germany 1918, Balkans WII. They become the sequel of mass armed insurrection against dictatorship. Kornilov failed coup de etat in Russia, Kapp failed coup de etat in Germany 1920, Spain 1936.

And while in Europe, revolutionary movements where either wiped out or incorporated before the middle of the 20th century, having been attacked, disarmed or transformed, in the periphery of capitalism the resistance to colonial rule and to imperialism continued incessantly on revolutionary terms around the globe. To those who underestimate revolutionary processes in places where the productive forces have yet to mature, according to the dogma, we juxtapose the paradigm of militant liberationist struggles of the most oppressed within the global capitalist arena. Can the exploited of the capitalist metropolis breach their dependence on the privilege that comes with imperialist domination and can they fight against nationalism, without the effective resistance and the revolutionary paradigm of the third world proletariat? The armed movement in Western Europe and North America from the 1960s onwards had accorded particular significance to the anti-imperialist struggle and to solidarity to movements in the periphery. This was something more than an expression of humanitarian sensitivity and consistency with the theory of imperialism; it was a class strategy.

The social revolution in Rojava and the ongoing revolt in Turkey open up paths for the revolutionary struggle globally.

The social self direction as is being put into practice in Rojava, transforms all relations, be they social, political, economic, within communities, between communities, vis a vis authorities, but also in the global field of class and interstate antagonism. On the one hand this is a project towards direct communism, through the self organized reconstruction of the social base and not via a centralized party determination. As the local assemblies or communes, as they’ve been named in Rojava, assume political force, the objective basis is created for the abolition of exploitative relations, the review of needs, the restructuring of production, and the collective reorganization of work. Let’s note as an example, that Rojava is the only place on the planet where the supply of oil is under the collective management of the residents. Only the universal politicization of the class base through processes of militant self direction, can subvert class domination, by redefining the notion of society and of humanity.

On the other hand, the abundant social partnership, without discrimination on the basis of race, religion or national borders, which is practiced in the open structures of self direction and self defense in Rojava, takes away from authoritarian powers at every level every pretence for their conservation, external intervention and repression. Internationalism, the anti-statist perspective and antimilitarism interject into the global war of the ruling classes with quality and force where these are realized en mass by the social base. The revolution in Rojava is a source for the revolutionary creation of civilization as a whole.

The catalytic participation of women in the proletarian war and their all-out contribution into the revolutionary sociopolitical procedures, based on their autonomous organization and its defining might, radicalize the struggle and the collective development. In a place that is brutalized, pillaged and chained by theocracy, the combative resistance of women becomes the front line of the revolution. The fact that the repressed and exploited base universally joins the struggle through new forms of co-organization, delivers incomparable strength. Women’s revolution is the womb from which a new social life is born and it is unbeatable.

Let’s for a moment look at the problem of theocratic terrorism. Should we support in every possible way the resistance against the onslaught of Islamic militarism, it is not because of our fundamental polemic against religion. Nor is it because we wish to side with imperialist liberalism. On the contrary, in Rojava, religious faith is not persecuted, whilst in democratic Europe, Islamic culture is demonized and persecuted, within the framework of a strategy to inflame interreligious conflict, class oppression and intensity of military control and fascism.

Islamic militarism has been bred by the euro-american capitalist centre, mainly by the U.S., since the 60s in order to turn the proletarian rage of peripheral countries, to strike communist movements, to distort anti-imperialist resistance and to throw societies into the chains of totalitarianism. During the post soviet era, NATO’s never ending war campaigns inflamed Islamic militarism. The local state authorities, such as the former regimes of Saddam and Assad, marshaled the same tool. The disdain for human life and freedom, the rampant destruction and the glorification of authoritarianism, as are exemplified in Islamic militarism, shape the modern mirror of the antagonism of state and capital.

In Syria, western imperialists and the baathist regime alike have invested in Islamic militias, in order to control social insurrection and to manage their contradictions, by means of the strife of the most oppressed. The only reliable bulwark against widespread destruction, but also against imperialist intervention, is the revolutionary movement of Rojava, because it is based on popular self defense and autonomy from every authority, and is opposed to theocratic totalitarianism, not as a tactical position but on principle. However, the most fundamental criteria for the strategy of the revolution are the promotion and defense of liberationist social achievements. Those who claim that war should be waged against all powers simultaneously, are perhaps unable to comprehend from their standpoint, what the revolutionary project requires. It is imperative to choose the determinant conflict at each moment in time, so as not to be crushed inside the antagonisms amongst different powers. Today, in Syria, the victory of the social revolution against theocratic militarism is of great historical and global significance. And for this reason, revolutionary comrades have come from distant places to fight in Rojava.

The internationalists who fight in solidarity in Rojava have breached national borders; the state borders that are guarded by the masters’ armies as well as the internal borders before all. Turkish and Kurdish fighters live and die side by side. Proletarians from Europe and the Balkans left the racist retrenchments and the western privileges behind, opening up paths towards the global revolution.

We state openly that we are calling people to join the struggle where the battle is taking place.

Distanced support is insufficient, even hypocritical. Intellectual critique is hostile, anti-proletarian and counter-revolutionary. Quoting the Anarchist Popular Union from Brazil (UNIPA): “For the revolutionary anarchists who defend materialism and dialectics as a method of analysis, what is important is the precise character of the unfolding struggle, whether it is just or unjust from the viewpoint of the social revolution. An anarchist organization must never abdicate its ideological, strategic and theoretical principles. This, as opposed to a puritan detachment, suggests participation and internal dialogue within the mass movement, with an understanding of the particularities of every tendency and faction, their history and present.”

We wish to note at this point that the comrades who fight in Rojava counter in practice the crypto racist statements which suggest that migrants should stay in their own countries in order to struggle. It is every person’s responsibility, and it must be a conscious responsibility for every revolutionary, that she/he shares all her processions with the oppressed, and above all that he shares in the struggle where the most oppressed live. Internationalists in Rojava are truly fighting against the causes of displacement, smashing the conservatism of the capitalist metropolis.

We will not close this introduction on a happy note; In Kurdistan, in Turkey, in the ghettos of the U.S., in Mexico, in Egypt, in the Ukraine and around the globe, proletarians are being slaughtered and are fighting. We do not intend to publish a nice brochure with this here event; rather we wish to strengthen the class war.

Here in Greece, conditions are worse. Facing the most brutal pillaging and terrorism perpetrated by a collapsing regime, there is no organized and combative movement ready to resist. At the same time as the armed left movement in Turkey and in Kurdistan is moving beyond statist politics, here many anarchists and leftists have lined up behind its most despicable form, social democracy. At the same time as the flame of revolt is spreading around the globe, here some have “discovered” the end of insurrection. And the state is raging on unrestrained.

Either we shall attempt the revolution today when it is necessary, or we shall be buried at the pit of history. There, in Rojava is the trial. Here, in the desert of despair we must build all that the living revolutions teach us.