Solidarity with the DAANES/Rojava and the Kurdish Struggle!
An Indigenous Anarchist Statement

The fate of the Rojavan-Kurdish struggle for land, women’s liberation, culture, language, and autonomy is inherently tied to the liberation of Turtle Island.

ANVI takes inspiration in the libertarian socialist character of the Local Council elements of the Syrian Revolution and its many martyrs, including Omar Aziz/Abu Kamel.

We also see great value in the internationalist, Women-led Rojavan Revolution that emerged from the Syrian Revolution and the longer Kurdish struggle.

We believe both of these elements serve as imperfect models for us Indigenous and settler anarchists on Turtle Island to learn from as an experiment of decolonial, multiethnic libertarian socialism.

We see the many different kinds of people in Syria and wider Kurdistan who fought and died to achieve and protect self-governance and autonomy.

In the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria’s model there is a glimpse of our own possible future: a long project of shared autonomy with different peoples united in the pursuit of freedom.

A future that reflects the DAANES’ broad coalition of Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, Yazidis, and internationalist volunteers that struggle in accompliceship alongside Kurds to heal and build a new anti-capitalist, pluralistic society.

We see in the Kurdish freedom movement a reflection of our own struggle against colonial encroachment: the degradation of land, of women, of matriarchal systems, and the familiar half-measure “Reconciliation” assimilations of states that continue to violently write over and annex Indigenous life.

We recognize in the Kurdish fight the same fire in our bellies that has carried our struggles through blockades, re-occupations, and long nights of resistance in resurgency.

Indigenous existence complicates the existence of any state, which demands our uniformity and assimilation, whether through coercion or brute force.

Indigenous people are expected to participate in our own political annihilation for some “greater good”, to preserve some false sense of harmony or unity.

To let our lands be exploited, our cultures and languages die out, to stop resisting against obvious injustice and indignity.

Our defence against this is labelled as subversive, divisive, or otherwise harmful to an ordained social order that we did not agree to be a part of.

From the Indigenous struggle against American-Canadian colonial extractivist projects. to the Tzotzil and Tzeltal Maya resistance against de-collectivization and cartel abuse, to the Mapuche struggle in Araucania against the Chilean state.

To the Palestinian people resisting the genocide at the hands of the zionist state, and to the Kurdish people who struggle for their own sovereignty.

The Kurdish struggle for autonomy, like ours, is ancient, fought for since the times of the Ottoman Empire. It is now fought against the Turkish state and its proxies.

The Syrian government frames their further invasion into Kurdistan as a honourable fight for the “unity and integrity” of their newly reconsolidated state, something that could’ve been achieved without bloodshed.

When Indigenous people blockade pipelines and logging roads here, we are often brow-beaten over disrupting the calm of civil Canadian society, threatening the “unity and integrity” of the nation state we didn’t ask to be a part of.

We see our Indigenous kin in the “United States” targeted by ICE in the same colonial regime logics that seek to fulfill the same worlds-destroying colonial project.

We recognize the same pigheaded colonial regime doublespeak bent on ethnic cleansing, with Syrian Transitional Government President al-Jolani deliberately naming his new campaign “al-Anfal,” (“the spoils of war”). This is after Saddam Hussein’s de-Kurdification campaign, Anfal, that resulted in the looting and genocide of 1200 Kurdish villages in 1988.

In both Turtle Island and Kurdistan, we see our Indigenous women and women warriors bearing the worst of this violence.

Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!

Rojava yalnız değildir!

Biji Kurdistan!