-#SORTtopics PKK, kurdistan, interview

-#notes <strong>Forty years ago, on 27th of November, 22 young people founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Fis village of Licê district of Amed (Diyarbakir). Anticipating the 1980 fascist military coup in Turkey, the party’s leader Abdullah Öcalan and other members traveled to Rojava on July 2, 1979. The following twenty years that the PKK leadership spent in Syria planted the seeds for the social, political and cultural revolution that we observe in northern and eastern Syria today. Let us hear about the social legacy of Öcalan and the PKK from the witnesses of that period: ordinary civilians, who were the first people to have opened their doors to the revolutionaries and whose lives were to politicize and revolutionize over the decades to come. In particular, the arrival of the PKK marked the beginning of women entering the public sphere to do political work. The women at the forefront of the struggle today say that their women’s revolution began with Öcalan’s arrival in 1979. Over decades, thousands of women and men from the villages, universities, and toiling masses in the towns, especially youth, joined the PKK from Rojava. Below are testimonies of people from Kobanê and Afrîn, two bastions of resistance in Rojava.</strong>