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title: 'Rojava Anarchists: One Year Since the Turkish Invasion of Rojava: An Interview with Tekoşîna Anarşîst'
date: 2023-09-02
---

Finally, it is worth mentioning something about the creation of the SDF. The SDF was a military umbrella created, in part, to allow the International Coalition led by the US to support Kurdish forces without clashing with Turkey. Turkey was threatening the United States that they would leave NATO if the US supported YPJ/G, so the US came up with the umbrella of the SDF rather than supporting the YPJ/G directly. For the Kurdish Liberation Movement, this step was necessary to ensure the survival of Rojava, to fight ISIS without letting Turkey crush the revolution. At the same time, it created dependency on the global imperialist hegemony, with all the contradictions and problems that entails. If a strong international revolutionary movement had existed at that time, things could have gone very differently.
--- Garzan

One of the key lessons is not to make enemies needlessly. Seek points of convergence, not conflict, when meeting and organizing with people. I believe it is a mistake to base your politics on sharing the same enemy or hatred. Be aware of what the essence of your political aim is. Not solely from a strategic point of view but also, for lack of a better word, from a philosophical one. In the end, everything comes down to the question “how to live life,” and if we share this with everyone we live and organize with and learn from, we need to have something with more substance than “We are here together because we hate Erdoğan, Trump, Nazis, patriarchy, racism…” Seeking the things that connect us with the people we share our lives with, outside of empty concepts like “American” or “white,” and living this deeper meaning and joy of life (and struggle) every day can enable people to realize that the things they hated others for are not important.
--- Şahîn

A civil war is necessarily a mess, and it is not necessarily a revolution. A civil war is something that we fight in order to defend the revolution, but winning a war does not liberate a society from colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism. That work is a constant struggle within ourselves and within society, and it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. Honestly, I worry about the way that revolution is often understood where I come from—as a thing that is glorious, violent, and singular. A revolution is a process of healing, something that is made much more difficult by constant attack. In times when there is a ceasefire, the advances we make in the revolution are massive, and in times of great threat and violence, we experience the most setbacks and find ourselves compromising some pretty important things. I would recommend that comrades get as excited about building up things that are worth defending as they are about the aesthetics of armed struggle. The truth is that war can wear people down, and when it goes on long enough, people get increasingly tired and will accept things that they wouldn’t have accepted before in hopes that the war will end. There are people here who think about leaving simply because they want their children to live without war for some part of their childhood. It takes strong social connection and a deep ethical foundation for a society to face the enemy and refuse to accept domination. This is what we have been learning about civil war.
As far as what is realistic—we will build free life. How we are going to get there is something we are all figuring out together every day. It is unrealistic to select methods and approaches that are not formulated in relation to the ultimate aim of building free life, then expect those methods and approaches to advance the struggle for free life. If we want victory, we have to be led by our aim, not by our impulses or by what is familiar yet hasn’t worked. This is also something we are learning from the movement here. We have to be open to trying new things, to making mistakes and learning from them. Beyond that, I don’t concern myself with what is realistic or unrealistic, because our ability to understand those things has been altered by our socialization in a system that wants to destroy our ability to imagine and believe in possibilities outside of it.
--- Ceren

A weapon cannot teach you how to love. It is easier to teach a revolutionary how to shoot than it is for a man who loves guns, war, and fighting to learn how to make a revolution, regardless of whether he is a great shot. Any day of the week I would prefer to be at the front with a revolutionary who has never shot a gun but understands with total clarity why we struggle and what we are defending, than with the most militarily capable person with no ideology. Weapons and all the military training in the world do not make people ready to do what is needed, not when we are defending a revolution. Maybe in an imperialist military, weapons and military training are enough, but we are not an imperialist military and we don’t have the resources they have—we have hevaltî. Weapons don’t build a revolution. Although they are certainly useful in helping to defend a revolution, they are only one part of the defense. Without every part of the system of self-defense working together, Rojava would not exist.
--- Ceren
