Women and girls march through the village of Derbesi to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.
A few years ago, I began hearing remarkable stories about a social movement in northern Syria. Not far from the wreckage of Aleppo, a society founded on principles of direct democracy and women’s rights has taken root in the predominantly Kurdish region known as Rojava. There, in defiance of the Islamic State’s brutal patriarchy, women are leading the way in political decision-making and fighting on the frontlines in their own battalions.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Sub-Saharan Africans started sleeping in these concrete pipes after they were forcibly evicted from their homes in Tangier’s Boukhalef neighborhood (visible in the background of the photo). Many of them had their belongings thrown out or burned by police, according to local activists. Some were carried off to other cities in Morocco.
Before they manage to reach Spain or Italy or Greece, people fleeing poverty and war in Sub-Saharan Africa head to port cities like Tangier. There, they face the risk of beatings and repression at the hands of authorities—or dying on the crossing to Europe.
A man carries his food and water for the day back to a makeshift campsite on the outskirts of Tangier. From the film Hijra–Dead End: Morocco
“This is a picture of the forests,” Michael says, flicking through the photos on his laptop. “At night they will struggle. I mean, how can a plastic bag save you from the cold? If it’s cold, it will be cold on you. If it rains, it will rain on you. If the police come there, they will burn down all this.”
Michael, a twenty-something man from Gambia, is showing me photos that he has collected during his year and five months in Morocco: some taken by him, others by journalists that he has met and befriended, others by friends who are migrants like himself. At great personal risk, he has been documenting human rights abuses and the daily struggles that migrants undergo in Morocco. (Some of the photos from his collection are interspersed throughout this story.) The images are unsettling. Young children sleeping in the cold. Men who have been beaten half to death. Families living in squalor in the forests.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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The civil war in Syria forced her to leave her home for another in Armenia, her ancestral homeland. Three years later, the war rages on, and the situation in the refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere remains grim.
Four years of a raging civil war in Syria have displaced more than eleven million people, ushering in the largest exodus since World War II. Of those forced from their homes, four million have fled the country. While the crisis has now reached Europe in a very visible way, the majority of Syrian refugees are not (yet) risking the hazardous journey to its shores. Instead, they are staying in countries not far from Syria’s borders: Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and—most noticeably—Lebanon, where an estimated one in three people is now Syrian.
Anahid, an ethnic Armenian woman from Aleppo, escaped Syria in 2012, soon after the country was engulfed in fighting between President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime and various rebel factions. She fled to Yerevan, the capital of her ancestral homeland, which borders Turkey. Later, Anahid moved to Lebanon, where she has relatives. There, she worked with Syrian refugees in their overcrowded camps. Last year, she traveled back to Syria with her British husband, Joseph Bailey, and witnessed the country’s presidential election. (Anahid is an alias. She has asked that her real name not be used because her father is still in Syria.)
The Highway of Death in Damascus, as viewed from the top floor of the house where Anahid and her husband Joseph Bailey stayed. “It’s the highway of the airport, but they call it the Highway of Death because one side is the rebel-held area and the other side is the government’s, so they keep shooting each other, especially when there are military buses or cars passing through.” The neighborhood on the left—the Free Syrian Army’s side—is completely destroyed; on the right is the government’s territory, where the buildings are still intact.
A vivacious woman in her late twenties, Anahid studied tourism in Aleppo but currently works as a freelance translator. When the war broke out, she and other Syrian Armenians were able to find refuge in Armenia because the government recognized them as citizens. Nevertheless, some of the Armenians already there did not welcome them at first, Anahid says. Culturally, the two groups are distinct. The modern Republic of Armenia, a Soviet state for eighty years, has developed a Russian-influenced dialect that is very different from the Armenian spoken in Syria. Most of those who are now “repatriating” to Armenia are descended from the Armenians who were relocated during the 1915 Armenian genocide, which took place in what is now modern Turkey and involved the killing, forced migration, and starvation of an estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children. (Anahid’s grandfather was one of the survivors: a young boy when he left Anatolia on his own, he was adopted by a Kurdish family in Aleppo and never learned what happened to his family back home.)
Aleppo until recently had an ethnic Armenian population of 60,000—one of the largest in the Middle East. Today, the city’s Armenian district is a fraction of its former size, with only a handful of hangers-on. Located inside a government-controlled area, it continues to be bombed by rebel forces.
Unlike Anahid, many ethnic Armenians and other Christian minorities in Syria supported the country’s secular socialist regime even before the conflict, believing that Assad offered them a degree of protection against Islamic extremism. Recently, Russia joined the conflict on the side of the government, providing air cover for a massive, ongoing push to retake rebel-held areas of Aleppo. While its actions have rankled Washington, Russia’s support of the Assad regime is seen more positively by some Syrian Armenians, who fear that the Islamic State, and not the US-backed rebels, will control the country once Assad falls. If that happens, there may not be a home for them to return to.
In The Fray contributing writer Jo Magpie interviewed Anahid about the events that drove her to leave Aleppo, her life as a “repatriate” in Armenia, and the refugee camps that she worked in while living in Lebanon—whose desperate conditions are pushing some Syrians to brave a perilous overseas journey to Europe.
Aerial shot of the Bekaa refugee camp.
When did you leave your home in Aleppo, and how easy was it to get out?
I left in 2012, in the last week of June. It wasn’t as bad as now, it was just the beginning of the problems in Aleppo. There had already been three big explosions before I left. The first one was on a Sunday. Me and my friend went to have breakfast near our house, and the minute we got out, there was this huge explosion. We didn’t know it was an explosion, so we started looking around. Then we saw that the building right in front of us was full of dust, and the glass was falling. People were running, and ambulances started to come.
A week later we were like, “Okay, everything looks safe, the city is calm, let’s go and have breakfast in front of the Citadel.” After fifteen minutes, while we were waiting for food, a protest started nearby in the Umayyad Mosque, and they [the government forces] started shooting at them. [The mosque’s famed minaret was destroyed in fighting in 2013. —ed.] We just had to run. My friend had to carry me because I was too scared to move. We just took the first bus that was getting out of there.
We didn’t plan to leave Aleppo. We were going to go back, but we heard that it was getting worse there.
How was your reception in Armenia? Was it easy to settle in?
It was more difficult for Syrians to be accepted here at that time. When I got a university scholarship, a group of kids would come to me at breaks and say, “You shouldn’t be studying here. Our parents save up money for years so that we can come to university, and you guys came like a month ago, and now you can come here for free.”
If you knew a local, people would accept you more. But if you were on your own, it was very hard. First the language barrier, and second that they were not feeling comfortable that people from another country were coming, and they thought their government was helping the Syrians—which was not true.
What’s your impression of how Yerevan has changed due to Syrian Armenians coming?
It’s helped the economy here a lot. They opened businesses that the locals weren’t able to, which means hiring more people. So the change is not bad, it’s mostly good—leaving aside the racism. A really small number of locals still consider us Arabs, or consider us to have betrayed the country—[we] left while the genocide happened and never came back. “You’re only here now that your country is in a war,” and stuff like that. But most people are very warm here now. They aren’t like they used to be three years ago.
You spent some time visiting refugee camps in Lebanon. What happened?
We moved from Armenia to Lebanon because my mum’s parents are there, and we thought we would have an easier life. It’s closer to Syria, a lot more aid organizations and the UN are there. I worked for a nongovernmental organization for three weeks as a volunteer. We would go to the camps and talk with women, to see how they were coping with life. When I stopped volunteering with the NGO, I decided that I wanted to go and visit with my friends sometimes. We would take candies or toys for the kids.
From the day we left Syria, me and a group of friends would always collect clothes and ship them to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan. Some Syrian musician friends did a benefit concert, and they made $5,000. It was very cold in the camps, so the title was “A Bag of Wood.” The donations and the ticket money made enough for 300 families—for wood to burn in the winter—and we bought some extra stuff, like rain boots for the kids. Me and Joseph decided to do some crowdfunding to make more money for blankets, and collected almost the same amount.
The tents of Syrian refugees in the camp in Lebanon.
What was the situation like in the camps you visited?
Back then I would always get shocked, but now it’s normal for me. The tents are basically a few pieces of wood. Sticks. And then big plastic sheets that the UN gives to them. Some use paper sheets from the billboards. They basically steal them, so they can cover more, because the UN only gives them six or eight sticks and three or four pieces of plastic, which is not enough to make a tent big enough for a family. There was this one woman who has nine kids, without her husband, because he was killed. Then she has her mum, dad, brothers, sisters, their families—they live in one tent.
Some of [the refugees] have heaters inside. Some of them have water, some don’t. In every camp there is one person who has a car, and most of the time this person becomes the leader of the camp. He goes to get water, and they bring barrels and fill them. The water containers that the UN gives to them are very small. It’s not enough for a family.
[The UN] would give them $30 a month for bread. Then they made it $28. They give you some flour, some rice. They would tell them that their kids can go to schools, but the schools are very far away. Nobody can drive them, and they cannot afford to take them, so they stay there.
They don’t have bathrooms. Each camp has one or two bathroom spaces outside somewhere, where they have made tents with these plastic things. This one camp had 100 or 150 families, and I didn’t see more than six or seven bathrooms.
There are unrecognized [private] camps. The owners often make demands, like “I want rent for the floor that you’re putting in your tent.” You can register for a UN-recognized camp, but some of [the refugees] are scared to go there. Some of them want to be closer to the city or to places where they can have a chance to work in a factory—but for a quarter of the wages a local would get.
It’s hard in Lebanon. Syrians are not very accepted there. The last few months I was there it was even more difficult for Syrians to find a job. Even if you can afford to rent a flat, you can’t afford to go to school.
Do you think that’s because of the amount of people that are coming now?
That has a very big influence. A lot of people say, “When there was war in Lebanon, Lebanese people also came to Syria.” But Lebanon is like four million [people]. [Including refugees, Lebanon’s population is now estimated to be six million. —ed.] If half of them came to Syria, Syria is big and it’s not so noticeable. But now half of Syria came to Lebanon. Lebanon is like a quarter of Syria’s size. They don’t have space. Cities were already overcrowded. It was already difficult for Lebanese people to have a job. Now Syrians are also looking for jobs, so that makes them a bit defensive.
How is the situation out of the camps—like, in Beirut, the capital?
In the city center you see a lot of Syrians who regret leaving [the camps]. They leave with the hope of moving to the city to find jobs and have a better life, but they end up homeless there, and nobody helps them.
Most of them are kids. At the end of the day, when they finish what they’re doing on the street—begging, selling flowers, or whatever—they go and sleep in the buildings. I would see one of them every day. He would sleep in a cardboard box with his little brother. They’re not older than twelve years old. During the day they sell flowers, and they sleep in the same spot.
We would ask [the homeless] where they’re from in Syria, to make sure they’re Syrians, and we would give them some money. Some of them were so excited that they didn’t believe it. We were in the car because we didn’t want a pile of people climbing on us when we were giving money. One of them took the money and ran away, then started running back, saying “You gave me too much!” He expected us to take it back.
The view from the balcony of the house where Anahid and Joseph stayed in Damascus. “I thought it would be scary for Joseph, but he kept insisting to sleep on the balcony on the top floor. We would watch the rockets every night.” During their stay one of those rockets hit the building right across from their room.
You went back to back to Syria recently. How was that?
I didn’t go to Aleppo. It wasn’t safe, especially when I have my husband, a foreigner, in Syria.
We stayed in Damascus for a few weeks, and it was normal, but right in front of [the house] was the ruined neighborhood. And then you have the Highway of Death. It’s the highway of the airport, but they call it the Highway of Death because one side is the rebel-held area and the other side is the government’s, so they keep shooting each other, especially when there are military buses or cars passing through.
We got there on the day of the Syrian election results. [Assad was reelected by a wide margin in 2014, but the opposition and many Western leaders called the election a sham. —ed.] There were celebrations, because we were in a government-controlled area, but you could see rockets flying to the other side.
I was used to it. I thought it would be scary for Joseph, but he kept insisting to sleep on the balcony on the top floor. We would watch the rockets every night.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Best of In The Fray 2015. We had come to the Syrian border to help refugees from Kobani, a Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State. In this corner of the country's unending civil war, another kind of conflict was being waged—for a city, a people, and a young democratic movement.
A camp in Suruç for refugees fleeing Kobani, a nearby Kurdish city under assault from the Islamic State.
We stand on an empty highway in South Turkey, twenty kilometers from the Syrian border. The dusty road leads to the city of Suruç. My husband and I are hitchhiking into a war zone, or at least the fringes of one. My heart thumps in my chest.
A yellow truck appears like a mirage in the distance. I stick out my thumb and the driver stops abruptly, kicking up a cloud of grey dust.
“Suruç?” he asks.
“Evet—yes,” I agree.
“Yardım?—to help?”
“Evet.”
The driver hands me his business card. He is none other than Suruç’s mayor, driving aid and supplies into the city himself. This is the first of many clues: everyone here is involved in the war effort.
It’s December 26, Boxing Day. Activists and volunteers have descended on Suruç to support Kurdish forces across the border in their fight against the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS. In the parts of Syria and Iraq that it now controls, ISIS has persecuted and displaced minorities. The victims of its highly publicized atrocities—rapes, forced marriages, beheadings, crucifixions—have included the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group.
Through the truck window, a compound with rows of identical green-grey semicircle tents comes into view. “Çadır kent—tent city,” the Mayor tells me, pointing. We pass a second camp shortly afterward. A sign announces our arrival: “Suruç: Population 101,000.”
The population is now more than twice what it says on the sign. An estimated 150,000 people—mostly Kurds—have fled to Suruç from Kobani, another Kurdish city that is inside Syria. ISIS has taken over part of Kobani, trapping those civilians who remain between its militants and the closed Turkish border.
The Mayor asks where we want to go. I have scribbled instructions from a friend of a friend I met in Diyarbakir. It says we should report to Suruç’s city hall.
In the aftermath of World War I, the French and British divvied up a large swath of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, splitting up the Kurdish people across the region’s redrawn national boundaries. Since then, the Kurds have found themselves unwelcome throughout the Middle East, the targets of massacres, chemical attacks, and state-perpetrated “disappearances,” along with political repression and discrimination.
The ongoing rebellion against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, however, has loosened the hold that Damascus had on the country’s Kurdish minority. In 2012, the Kurdish inhabitants of northern Syria took advantage of Assad’s retreating forces, declaring their region autonomous and naming it Rojava—Kurdish for “western.” (Rojava is the western part of what many Kurds consider to be Kurdistan, a culturally defined region that also includes large parts of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and northern Iraq.)
The war has also brought the Kurds unprecedented news coverage. After the Islamic State began its siege of Kobani, the media called attention to not only the waves of Kurdish refugees but also the strength of Kurdish fighters—especially the women fighters—and the progressive stances that Kurdish political parties have taken on issues such as feminism and minority rights.
A few of the more astute commentators also mentioned the innovative system of governance—democratic self-management—being tested in Rojava. Equal rights are enshrined in the Rojava system. There are three official languages. Every canton is administered by three leaders—in theory, a Kurd, an Arab, and a Christian—with at least one of the three a woman. In practice, of course, most of these ideas have not filtered all the way down. Many Kurds still fight for a country of their own. But many others just want to coexist peacefully with other Syrians.
It strikes me how very normal Suruç looks, despite the war being only ten kilometers away. Shops, restaurants, and teahouses are open. People bustle about the streets. Men wearing red and white kaffiyeh on their heads loiter around the main square, chatting, smoking, and haggling with the merchants.
We saunter into the city hall shouldering our huge backpacks, tired and smelly after days spent hitchhiking around the frozen edges of Anatolia. The few men who stroll past us in the narrow corridors greet us formally despite our disheveled appearance.
I explain to one of them that we have come to help. Some of our friends have been here before, and they advised us to come to the city hall when we arrived, I say.
A man with a characteristically Turkish mustache points to some benches in the hallway. We sit. Soon tea arrives. Another man ushers us into a small office, where I repeat the same halting explanation to yet another man behind a desk. He nods politely, thanks us for coming, and directs us to the city’s cultural center, now a base of operations for the constant stream of activists and volunteers coming through the town. There, a girl who speaks good English points us to the distribution center down the road. She says they need help there now.
The distribution center is a converted wedding salon, filled with stacks of aid packages from around the globe. Groups of volunteers scoop the contents of big sacks into small clear bags, which are then flung onto growing mountains of red lentils, rice, sugar, and chickpeas.
At Suruç’s distribution center, volunteers prepare packages of food for the Kobani refugees.
We are warmly greeted by people who speak to us in Turkish, English, and German. Someone hands me a melting plastic cup of tea. “Parti mi?” a girl asks in Turkish. She wants to know if I’m here with a “party,” meaning any of the Kurdish political parties. “No,” I tell her, “just with my husband. You?”
“Evet, parti,” she nods, smiling. She demonstrates how one of us should hold the bags open while the other shovels lentils from the big sack into the smaller one—“not too much, like this, see?”—and then ties it and tosses it onto the stack.
This food, I am told, will go to refugees from Kobane who are living in residential buildings around the city.
The activity here is both methodical and chaotic. Nothing seems to run on a timetable, and people work when they feel like it. Nobody is visibly keeping track of who’s doing what or when. But somehow, everything just gets done.
Every ten minutes, someone asks if I want tea. One man in particular seems very concerned that I drink enough of it. He brings a steaming thermos and small stack of plastic cups around regularly.
Around 7 p.m. a bell rings. We follow the people wandering outside to a van that has just arrived. Two men in the back scoop lentil stew from an enormous metal pot onto flimsy plastic plates.
That night we drive out to Mahser, the last village before the Syrian border—and the raging war beyond it.
A sign says “Çaykara.” The village’s local name is Mahser, but officially it is Çaykara—like all Kurdish settlements in Turkey, it had its name changed during the previous century as part of the government-enforced Turkification process.
We are now a mere kilometer from Syria. In the village, I spot a friend. She is perched on a block of concrete where someone has painted the word “Kobani” in the Kurdish colors of green, red, and yellow. My friend, like myself, is something of a nomad. She has a long-held interest in Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, and has been writing a blog about the region for some years under the pseudonym “Iris.”
Iris is watching the Kobani skyline, just visible in the distance. “We always meet in interesting places,” I tell her, just as a fiery mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon, accompanied by a mighty boom. My heart drops through the floor.
When they hear us speaking English, a crowd of men gather and begin firing questions. Iris speaks Turkish more or less fluently and has a working knowledge of Kurdish. I let her do the talking.
We’re invited to drink tea by some of the men. We follow them through the village and enter a small room where about fifteen men sit on the floor. They each stand to greet us, and motion for us to sit.
“Parti mi?” Iris asks.
All the men around us nod slowly. Iris points to a sign on the wall advertising the HDP—the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a Kurdish left-wing political party in Turkey. “HDP?”
The man closest to us looks at her. “Actually, we are all PKK,” he says.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a notorious Kurdish political organization. From 1984 to 1999, the party fought an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdistan within Turkish territory. Since the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, and his subsequent shift in political views, the organization has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots and recast itself as a nonhierarchical social movement working on behalf of autonomy and rights for all minorities. Despite its more moderate approach in recent years, the PKK remains on the Turkish, EU, and US terrorist lists.
Iris decides this is a fantastic time to quiz the men about Ocalan, who is still the party’s leader—and still inside a Turkish island prison somewhere in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years Ocalan has come out in favor of environmental protection, gender equality, and rights for LGBT and ethnic minorities. So what explains the discrepancy, Iris asks, between those progressive views and what she’s seeing on the ground—nonrecyclable plastic dishes, women doing most of the housework, entrenched patriarchal views?
The man nearest us nods slowly, politely considering this criticism. “You know,” he says, “these things take time.”
It’s 10 a.m. sharp. Men, women, and children gather by the line of red tape that separates the village from a field—the only thing between them and the Kalashnikov fire echoing in the distance.
A semicircle forms and quickly expands. This is the daily demonstration, a show of solidarity with the PKK and YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia) forces fighting right across the border. “Freedom to Kurdistan! Freedom to Kobani!” the crowd shouts in unison. “We are PKK, PKK is us! We are YPG, YPG is us!”
In Mahser, a crowd gathers near Turkey’s border with Syria, rallying in support of Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State a short distance away.
The crowd goes on to recite a string of other well-rehearsed slogans that I can neither understand nor follow. After they’ve run out of chants, they extend their well-wishes to the fighters and, at the very end, to Apo—their affectionate nickname for Ocalan.
I hear gunfire ricochet through the streets beyond the field. What can it be like over there? I’ve heard that around 7,000 civilians chose to stay in the city when the Islamic State began its assault.
I meet a woman just before leaving Mahser. She’s from Kobani and doesn’t speak Turkish, but somehow we’re able to communicate through basic words and gestures. The woman tells me she has three sons fighting in Kobani. Her eyes remain fixed on the hazy outline of the city, as if she hopes to catch sight of them.
While I watched the war from across the field, Italian journalist Francesca Borri was trying to escape it.
Several days earlier, Francesca had been smuggled over the Syrian border into Kobani. She had left after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State. “The point is not getting in, as usual,” Francesca tells me when we meet up in Suruç. “The point is getting out.” She says she was refused reentry into Turkey by Turkish border guards, who told her, “No, no, you went to Kobani. You have Kurdish friends, stay with them!”
I ask her about the civilians inside the city she just left. So far, they’re doing alright, she says: the Kurdish fighters look after them, and they are staying in their own homes on one side of the city. Around half are children. “I mean, of course, it’s a war,” Francesca says. “Kobani isn’t Paris. But I would say that compared to other wars, it’s a good situation for civilians.”
Francesca describes three levels of fighting inside Kobani—Kalashnikov fire exchanged on the frontline, heavy artillery shells lobbed into the city by the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi forces who have entered Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State), and aerial bombardment by the US-led coalition. “The battle is mortar fire and rocket fire from one extreme to the other of the city, so you just stay in the middle—and if you’re lucky, nothing is dropped on your head.”
Francesca is a seasoned war correspondent, having spent much of the last two and a half years reporting on Syria. To her, the war raging in Kobani is “a war within a war”—a war for the future Kurdistan wedged into the sprawling and endless conflict in Syria.
In Mahser, the sound of gunfire was constant. Back in Suruç, I feel safe and far from the fighting. Inside the cultural center, people sit in small groups and converse in a mélange of languages: Kurmanji, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, English. Many are Kurds from other parts of Turkey. Some are members of the diaspora who grew up in European countries such as Germany or Switzerland.
Then there is Darlene. Originally from Ireland, Darlene O’Carroll is currently studying in Copenhagen. She has come to Suruç for her Christmas holiday.
Darlene tells me she decided to make the trip after watching news footage of the devastation in Kobani. “When I should have been working, I was looking at all the images. There were a few that just kind of pulled at my heartstrings.”
On Darlene’s first day in the city, a Kurdish man from Iran showed her around. “This was my first shock,” she says. “He’s Mormon. His family were executed by the Iranian government. His uncle sent him to India to study IT, and when he came back, he worked for a cable company, and he had his own store….” Darlene pauses for a moment. “His plan is to finish up here … and then go to Kobani to fight. I asked him, ‘How long are you staying?’ And he just said, ‘Until I die.’ It was like … ‘Until I finish this cup of tea …’” Darlene shakes her head. “It probably won’t hit me fully until I go back to Denmark.”
Since she arrived, Darlene has been helping with wiring electricity in the camps. She also works with a Kurdish theater group from Istanbul that gives refugee children here a creative outlet to express themselves through improvisation and roleplaying.
Today, Darlene has been invited to join a daf workshop in a camp at the edge of the city. (A daf is a large frame drum, popular throughout the Middle East.) I tag along.
A group of children, mostly young teenage and preteen girls, fill one of the tents. The walls are decorated with pictures of Kurdish musicians, drawings of animals, and the word “Kobani” drawn neatly in pastel colors.
One of the youngest girls can say a few words of English. When we answer her questions, the other children’s eyes grow wide. They prod her to ask us more.
Initially camera shy, the children slowly get used to our presence. One of the two boys is a master daf player and models for my camera. Before long, some of the younger girls are posing too and taking pictures of each other.
A daf drum workshop at a refugee camp in Suruç.
Later, I will read that there are 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey—half of them children.
Later that night, Iris and I are walking the dark and dusty streets of Suruç when we hear the murmurs of a thumping rhythm carried on the wind. Iris knows exactly what it is—”A wedding!”
We follow the beat, which soon becomes a cacophony of drums and whoops. We turn a corner and find a hundred people dancing in a winding circle across the street. Young boys dash between legs. A man fires a shotgun repeatedly into the air, while another holds fireworks in his bare hands and shoots them into the sky. A small circle within the larger circle of dancers carries a man aloft on a chair. It is the groom. His shirt is in disarray, his face smeared with paint. He wears an exhausted grin—Kurdish weddings last three days and nights.
We stand and watch the spectacle until we are noticed. A man who speaks English brings two chairs and sits down to chat with us. A woman serves us tea. Some of the young girls shyly sneak glances at the two foreigners.
I tell Darlene about our adventure later that night. She smiles. “They love seeing people from other countries here—I can really feel that. In the camps, they invite you in for dinner, and they say to you in the shops, ‘You know, if you don’t have a bed to sleep in tonight, you can stay here with us.’ There’s always somebody handing you food, there’s always someone handing you a cup of tea. At nighttime, if you’re cold, they’re always pulling blankets up over you. They really try and look after you.”
It’s our final night in Suruç. My husband and I lie in our tent in a small garden behind the cultural center. It’s the weekend, and dozens of new volunteers have arrived. Both of the center’s visitor rooms and the two heated tents behind us are full, and a group of young Kurdish men are sleeping in the main room.
The ground shakes every so often throughout the night, as the US-led coalition forces drop bombs on Islamic State targets in Kobani. The blasts are not so loud from here, and they would be indistinguishable from the growl of truck motors on the road outside were it not for the quaking earth.
A rumor, reportedly from one of the YPG fighters, says Kobani will be freed in the next two or three days. The prediction turns out to be wrong—about the date, that is. A few weeks later, a man I met in the distribution center sends me pictures of the liberation of Kobani. They show a Kurdish red, green, and yellow flag being raised over a hill overlooking the city, replacing the black Islamic State flag that previously flew there.
Today, the residents of Kobani are slowly beginning to return to their homes. Much of the city remains uninhabitable after months of fighting and destruction. The long rebuilding process is now underway.
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces continue to fight in neighboring areas. Many other communities across Syria and Iraq are still occupied by ISIS.
But Kobani is free. When I saw the photos of its liberation, I imagined the celebrations in the cultural center, and the wild all-night dancing around fires in Mahser. I wish I could have stayed to see it, and I wonder what the future will bring.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Best of In The Fray 2014. Through photography, journalism, and social media, Onnik Krikorian is chipping away at the cross-border hatreds that once escalated into a vicious war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—one that has never really ended. Over the years he has seen little progress toward peace at the highest levels of government, but at the grassroots and among the young, he says, there is hope for change.
When the Soviet Union began to crumble a quarter-century ago, more than a dozen of its former republics gained their independence. But in the South Caucasus—that much troubled limb of land that, depending on your perspective, either connects or divides the Eurasian continent—the withering of Soviet rule meant the escalation of war. In the early nineties, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, landlocked region inhabited mainly by ethnic Armenians but recognized by the United Nations as part of Azerbaijan. The conflict left as many as 25,000 dead and a million displaced from their homes.
Since then, attempts to broker a lasting peace between the two countries have failed. Ethnic hatreds go far back, entangled as they are with Armenian hostility toward Turkic people and anti-Armenian sentiment that fuelled the Armenian genocide conducted a century ago in the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire. Although Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire in 1994, dozens continue to die each year in frontline skirmishes. And the situation has worsened in the past few months, with the fighting intensifying and the threat of a large-scale conflict becoming more palpable. “We expect war every day,” said the commander of Karabakh’s defense forces, Movses Hakobyan, in a recent interview. “And the goal of our army is to stand ready for it.”
Onnik Krikorian is a British-born journalist, photographer, and media consultant who has worked for years to promote peace between the two countries. His independent-media platform Conflict Voices brings together grassroots activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists from around the region, who use social media to challenge stereotypes and encourage dialogue between ordinary citizens of both countries.
“There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, ‘No, no, no!’ And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still.”
Normally, Azerbaijanis and Armenians have very limited contact. Armenia is an oligarchy, rife with electoral fraud and poverty; Azerbaijan is a dictatorship. Each country routinely demonizes the other in the media. Krikorian, whose ethnic surname comes from his Greek Armenian father, emphasizes the need for an alternative view of the conflict, one not swayed by the propaganda on either side. Through his work with Conflict Voices, his role as a consultant and trainer, and his own writing and photography, Krikorian has sought to build that “third narrative” piece by piece, documenting life in communities where ethnic Azeris and Armenians still live and work together peacefully.
Nowadays Krikorian is based in Georgia—a country he describes as something of a neutral ground between its two warring neighbors. He has reported extensively on his city of Tbilisi, including recent pieces on the lives of its street kids and an environmental protest camp in Vake Park devoted to stopping the construction of a hotel. Yet his work as a journalist has also taken him to the farthest corners of the region. His photography tells the stories of the forgotten people of the South Caucasus: those living in remote villages, foraging landfills, or dwelling in institutions.
In The Fray spoke with Krikorian about his days toiling on Web 1.0 websites, his first awkward but breakthrough meeting with young Azerbaijani bloggers, his hopeful pragmatism about the ongoing conflict, and why he thinks photojournalism is, at its heart, about empathy.
How did you first get into photography, and what was the process that led you to the South Caucasus, doing the kind of work that you do?
When I was in my early teens I saw the work of Don McCullin, a British war photographer, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed poverty in the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930s. It just blew me away. These images for me represented what the power of photography was. They weren’t just of foreign wars, they were also of poverty in the United Kingdom, for example, and it had a major effect on me. That was what really pushed me into photography.
I started at the Bristol Evening Post doing paste-up and sub-editing. Eventually I decided to move to London. I got a job at the Independent newspaper, but again on the production side of things. It was then that I got to the South Caucasus. The ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh had just been signed, so I went to the picture editor and said, “Listen, there’s a humanitarian-aid flight going to Nagorno-Karabakh. Let me go.” And the guy said, “Sure, okay.”
When I came back, Mosaic—the web browser that popularized the Internet—had been released. I took a look at this web browser and thought, Wow, I understand where this is heading, and I need to do this. So in 1994, I set up my first Internet site, on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I also became involved with the Kurdish Human Rights Project, following a chance meeting with some Kurdish activists in London.
In 1998 they asked if I’d like to go to Armenia to research the human rights situation of the Yezidis, the largest minority in Armenia [a Kurdish religious group now in the news because of their persecution in ISIS-dominated Iraq —ed.], and while there it was obvious that there was very little reliable information coming out of the country. I was struck by the poverty, the corruption, and other issues that no one was really reporting on. So that’s when I decided to write. Because ultimately, I felt that these issues need to get out there. I was offered a job with the United Nations Development Programme and moved to Armenia in 1998. That’s when the sort of work I do now started.
What languages do you speak?
I speak English and some Armenian. I learned Armenian when I was in Armenia. While my dad is ethnic Armenian from Greece, my mum is English. My parents divorced when I was about a year old, so I was never brought up by Armenians, and I never had any contact with Armenians until I was about twenty-one, when I got in touch with my father again. I don’t know what that really says. Maybe I have a different view of how identity works.
This concept of ethnicity in the South Caucasus is a concerning thing. People relate to each other here based on their ethnic group, rather than, you know, “You’ve got the same biological makeup as me.”
Children pose in an abandoned van in Stepanakert, the capital of the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, soon after the ceasefire was signed in 1994.
How did Conflict Voices come into being?
In 2007 I was Caucasus regional editor for an organization in the United States called Global Voices. I would put together posts about issues that were underrepresented in the regional and international media from the South Caucasus—for example, about gay rights, women’s rights, or the flawed process of elections in the region. But in 2008, Facebook started to emerge in the region, and then things really got interesting. You could basically form relationships across borders online.
I was still based in Yerevan, Armenia. As the regional editor for Global Voices, how could I do anything referring to Azerbaijan without knowing what was really happening there, or without even being in contact with any Azerbaijanis? It’s just not professional, and it’s definitely not possible to have a clear view of the region if you don’t speak to people from the other countries. So I ventured up to Tbilisi and made contact with some Azerbaijani bloggers at a BarCamp. It was very interesting. You had the Armenian contingent, who would be standing about twenty meters away from the Azerbaijani contingent. They were just totally separate. I thought, Well, this is bloody stupid! So I decided to approach the Azerbaijanis. I had my camera on me. They thought, This looks like a photographer, let’s give him our cameras and ask him to take pictures of us together.
I handed them their cameras, and they said, “Thanks very much, where are you from?” I said. “I’m from England.” They said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Onnik Krikorian.” Deathly silence. But people are people, and there’s always that initial thing when you have stereotypes and whatever. You don’t know how to react in such a situation. After ten seconds, they say, “Thanks, stay in touch. Could you send some of the images you took with your camera?” So I found them on Facebook and made contact with them. Suddenly, a world in Azerbaijan through young Azerbaijanis was opened up to me. And not surprisingly, they weren’t very different from Armenian youth.
They’re not totally preoccupied with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and they have the same interests as any young person does—mainly posting about music, films, university, or whatever. I saw the potential of social media to break down stereotypes and thought, if only a young Armenian in Armenia could see what a young Azerbaijani is doing. They would see that actually each side is not a monster, each side is not perpetually thinking about armed conflict. In that sense, social media was incredibly revolutionary.
I had a foot in the door of Azerbaijani social networks. And as a journalist, the more they saw my work, the more I think they understood that I wasn’t a threat. Trust and relationships were built, and my material was shared. I thought, okay, something really has to be done now, something proper, because this is a very wonderful, personal tool for connecting people.
Has this affected your view of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
Yes, it’s changed my view of the conflict. Don’t get me wrong—it’s also a really depressing situation, with no solution anywhere in sight. In 1994, when I returned to London from Nagorno-Karabakh, analysts were telling me, “In twenty years, the conflict will be solved.” Well, it’s now twenty years since then, and the conflict is nowhere even close to being solved. I’m not even sure it’ll be close to being resolved in another twenty years.
So do you just envision a continuing standoff, or do you think something else is going to happen?
I think the standoff continuing is, unfortunately, a safe bet. What some are concerned about, however, is whether hostilities will resume. I think the consensus is that no side will start a new war, but that there’s a danger of an accidental war when a skirmish on the border spirals out of control. But despite how depressing the situation looks, I can at least see in the interactions I have with Azerbaijanis and Armenians, that there is a—albeit small—group of progressive, open-minded people on both sides.
They communicate with each other, and some meet face-to-face. In Georgia, of course, you have ethnic Armenians and Azeris who have absolutely no problem with each other at all.
You have now been based in Georgia for two years. Was this a tactical decision?
Georgia is very different from Armenia. There’s a more liberal and freer environment here. I’d been visiting since 1999, and even then—when it was a failed state, when it was criminal, when there were problems with electricity—there was something about Tbilisi that I really loved. Yes, I knew all the problems, and it was inconceivable that the Rose Revolution would happen and things would start going in the right direction. There was something I liked about the place, and I always knew I’d probably end up here. My Armenia-Azerbaijan work is another reason. This is the center of the South Caucasus, the place where everyone can intermingle.
It’s difficult for Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan to get into Armenia, and it’s even harder for Armenians to go to Azerbaijan. It’s a horrible conflict and people don’t mix. People-to-people contact is an incredibly important—if not the most important—component of reconciling differences and finding a peaceful solution. And it’s the one thing that the citizens of both countries are prevented from doing—except in Georgia. There are Armenians from Armenia and Azerbaijanis from Azerbaijan mixing here. Not thousands, but it does happen.
I think this is the strength of Georgia. It’s always been the heart and soul of the South Caucasus.
Ethnic Armenians in the Georgian village of Tsopi. Situated close to the country’s border with Armenia and Azerbaijan, the village is 70 percent ethnic Azeri. The rest of the villagers are ethnic Armenian. Integrated villages like Tsopi challenge the notion that the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is merely an ethnic one.
You know, you have this in Georgia. But when you have really intense nationalism and propaganda in Armenia and Azerbaijan, both sides cannot see eye to eye or find any common ground. Some would argue this is by design. Both governments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because it allows them to cling onto power. They’ve come to power on the back of the Karabakh conflict, and presidents have lost power on the back of it, too. These are the things that have defined the leadership in both countries. But there are alternative voices emerging, and that’s the most important thing for me. Ten years ago these alternative voices didn’t have a space, online or off, but now you have alternative media outlets in both countries. I would even argue that despite there being more anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan than anti-Azeri sentiment in Armenia, there’s an even larger group of alternative young Azeris who are more open-minded than their counterparts in Armenia.
There could be very many reasons for this. It could be because there’s a more oppressive regime there. But the youth movements, the alternative voices in Azerbaijan are incredibly impressive—and they face the greatest risks in the entire South Caucasus for what they’re doing.
I stumble upon something and see there’s something wrong and that no one is covering it. Actually, the problem of vulnerable children in residential care started in Armenia, as part of a big project I did on poverty in Armenia. There’s a lot of poverty. I saw this and I was very shocked by it. I worked with organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], and that took me into the issue of the institutionalization of children. In 2007 I came to Georgia to look at the situation here. They had the process of de-institutionalization, so it was an interesting contrast.
Vake Park was an impressive display of a non-politically partisan social movement that managed to attract the involvement of everyone. I’m used to movements in Armenia being politicized, and for me that’s not the way you achieve social change. Maybe it’s a part of it, but you need grassroots nonpoliticized movements. Vake Park is still going on, the hotel has not been constructed, and they’ve still got their camp. It was a pleasure to document something like that, as well as an interesting story.
The street kids project is ongoing. There’s a lot of kids on the streets of Tbilisi. These kids are not necessarily sleeping on the streets. The majority do have homes, but are from poor families. They’ve got no choice but to beg on the street from early morning until late at night. The street is not a safe place for a kid. Under UNICEF’s definition, they are still street kids. They’re great kids. I really enjoy hanging out with them.
It seemed that you had a strong rapport with those kids—and, in other stories, with the people who live by salvaging from landfill sites, or who live in small villages like Tsopi and Sissian. How do you create a level of trust that allows you to take such intimate portraits?
You don’t necessarily try to gain their trust. You either have empathy with them, or you don’t. A lot of photojournalism is about empathy with a subject. Unless, of course, it’s a battle raging around you, or police beating protesters—then you don’t really have empathy with the policeman—but for those sorts of social issues, you need empathy. You can tell if someone’s being open with you or not. Also, it takes a lot of work. In some cases you have to spend days for them to get to know you. There were times documenting poverty in Armenia and especially at the landfill sites that I wouldn’t take any photographs, because they didn’t want pictures taken. Why would someone who’s taking rubbish off a landfill want their picture taken? Why would someone who’s living in extreme poverty want their picture taken? Of course they don’t want their picture taken. There was this horrible hostel in Yerevan, and this beautiful little kid in rags. I ask to take a picture and her mother says, “No, no, no!” And she drags the kid away, takes her into the only other room, and then emerges with her in this clean, immaculate dress. I’ve got a picture of the mother with the kid sitting on her lap, brushing her hair, and she’s dressed beautifully, because they’ve got pride still. Maybe that picture works because it shows that. I can’t go into someone’s home and intervene in their lives, then just walk out. I would also go back many times, to see if their lives had improved.
Have there been any improvements?
A family living in a run-down hostel in the Erebuni district of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. The little girl, Isabella, sits on her mother’s lap. She died a week later, after falling seven floors in an unsafe stairwell.
The poor people, no. There is the building of the homeless shelter, but that’s not really a major success story, because the government, being the Armenian government, decided to build the homeless shelter right on the outskirts of the city, where no homeless person can actually get to. Homeless people stay around markets, and there’s a reason for this, and that’s because homeless people go through the bins later looking for discarded stuff. And buses won’t take homeless people. And taxis, even if they could pay, don’t take homeless people. So it seemed like a success, but in reality it didn’t really do much to achieve a solution.
I guess the main success story for me is the number of Armenians and Azerbaijanis that I’ve managed to connect who would never have done so without me acting as a bridge. You need someone to break the ice and to bridge that divide. I think that’s the most successful thing I’ve managed to do. Of course, the conflict is nowhere near resolution, and however many people I manage to connect, it’s still not a critical mass. I was recently at a closed meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh, and a very bright guy from Azerbaijan simply noted, “There’s no peace movement. There’s no demand for peace. And NGOs, it’s time for you to stop sitting around, patting yourselves on the back, talking about the projects that you’ve done, because they’re really not changing much. There really is no genuine grassroots peace movement in the South Caucasus, and especially Armenia and Azerbaijan, and now you guys need to work on creating one.”
Maybe that’s what I hope I can contribute to. To try and make this bigger. Obviously I can’t do it on my own, but maybe as part of a bigger process that can finally sort out the mess that is the Nagorno- Karabakh conflict. It’s a major obstacle to the development of both countries. The conflict will be over one day. It cannot last forever, and so I’d like to think that my work can be part of the process that brings that day sooner. Of course, whether I’ll see it in my lifetime is still unclear.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness By Susannah Cahalan
Free Press. 288 pages.
What does it feel like to go insane and not know why? In her memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, author Susannah Cahalan describes what it is like in terrifying detail: “My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth.… This moment, my first serious blackout, marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming weeks, I would never again be the same person. This was the start of the dark period of my illness, as I began an existence in purgatory between the real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made up of hallucinations and paranoia.”
At the time, Cahalan was twenty-four years old and working at the New York Post. Having climbed up slowly from an intern to a full-time news reporter, she was young, ambitious, and known for being confident and professional. Cahalan’s future was bright when she was suddenly struck by an affliction that stumped her, her family, and most medical professionals.
Cahalan uses her reporter’s skills to knit together the incidents surrounding her downward spiral. She tries to piece together a time about which she has little or no recollection. Her few existing memories range from fuzzy half-truths to full-out hallucinations. She recounts the experience of paging through her father’s diary like she was reading about a stranger.
Cahalan deftly weaves together intimate moments with intricate medical explanations of her condition, which at times reads like a detective story. By meticulously retracing her own footsteps through seizures, rampant paranoia, and delusions, Cahalan engages with her passion for research. She walks readers through her various misdiagnoses — including one doctor who insisted that alcoholism was to blame — and eventually reaches the point of an accurate diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.
Brain on Fire makes for a gripping read. As Cahalan describes in her introduction, the book is “a journalist’s inquiry into that deepest part of the self — personality, memory, identity — in an attempt to pick up and understand the pieces left behind.”
After interviewing a host of doctors and experts around the globe, Cahalan was able to report every aspect of her illness and treatments — including her own brain surgery — in detailed yet accessible terms. “With a scalpel, Dr. Doyle made an S-shape incision, four centimeters from the midline of the scalp over the right frontal region. The arm of the S extended just behind my hairline,” she writes. “He parted the skin with a sharp blade and gripped each side with retractors.… The whole procedure took four hours.”
Divided into three parts, the first section of Brain on Fire leads us from the murky confusion of Cahalan’s initial seizures and bouts of paranoia through the fragmented and reconstructed memories of her time in the hospital. Cahalan writes with flagrant honesty, piecing together hospital records, her parents’ shared diary, video footage from her time in a monitored epilepsy ward, and her own disjointed scribblings. This timeline of events is combined with the narrative occurring within Cahalan’s own distorted mind, which is set apart in italics to differentiate the two realities.
During these highly personal accounts, Cahalan describes her hallucinations and paranoia. At one point, she obsessively searches her boyfriend’s apartment for proof of his alleged infidelity. We feel her panic and confusion escalate as the book progresses, and Cahalan struggles to maintain a sense of her authentic identity. “No one wants to think of herself as a monster,” she writes.
As Cahalan’s situation worsens, the heroic Dr. Souhel Najjar arrives on the scene. After seemingly endless tests using the highest technology, Dr. Najjar is able to solve the puzzle. Cahalan is diagnosed with a little-known, recently discovered autoimmune disease called anti-NMDAR encephalitis.
“Her brain is on fire,” Dr. Najjar tells Cahalan’s parents. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”
Cahalan goes on to detail her bumpy road to recovery, in which she deals with the burden of “survivor’s guilt” — a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder — and a fear of relapse that is said to occur in twenty percent of cases. It is frightening how little is known about this rare disease, and as Cahalan writes, “It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”
Aside from being an excellently written memoir, Brain on Fire is also a valuable case study of a rare neurological disease. Cahalan is the 217th person to ever be diagnosed with anti-NMDAR encephalitis, and her diagnosis occurred just two years after the disease was discovered. Brain on Fire and “My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” the article from which the book emerged, have been instrumental in helping more people receive a correct diagnoses and treatment for the disease.
Cahalan’s work raises many questions about the root of “madness” and how easily we sling the term about. For those struggling to make sense of a disease like hers, Brain on Fire offers guidance and understanding. For the rest of us, it’s a fascinating and well-told cautionary tale.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
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