When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, one of the first things Bashar al-Assad’s regime did was to pull back troops from the country’s north-east so that they could defend the heartland against militias. This gave an opportunity to Syria’s Kurds, the country’s largest ethnic minority who make up some 10% of its population, to establish a de …
The Kurdish liberation of the Isis-held city of Minbij, in northern Syria, in 2016, was just the kind of event that the German filmmaker Antonia Kilian needed to happen to spur her on. “So I grew up with an idea of what feminism could be, and with this sense of organising as a woman.” open image in gallery Kilian: ‘I …
The coronavirus is surging in a region of northern Syria struggling from the devastating effect of a near-decade of war. “We equipped the centre in a month to treat moderate cases of coronavirus and on November 20 it was ready,” Obeid Muslim, head of the Health Committee of Tabqa in the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, told …
In 2019, President Donald Trump made a controversial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Northeast Syria, essentially greenlighting a Turkish-led invasion of areas controlled by America’s Kurdish allies. There are many women now in the custody of Islamist groups who are backed by Turkey.” A grim report recently submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council alleged that these rebels “may …
