Italian ecological journalist Umberto Mazzantini has recently published an article in the Italian online newspaper greenreport. It titled ‘Turkish army bombs Kurdish guerrillas with banned weapons and dirty bombs’. Mazzantini accuses the world of looking the other way.
Greenreport .It is an Italian newspaper founded in 2006, that supports ecological struggles with a focus on Italy. Umberto Mazzantini is an Italian journalist focusing on biodiversity and international politics.
The article begins by exposing Turkey’s hypocritical policies. On the one hand, Turkey shows itself as a mediator in the war between Russia and Ukraine and condemns Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, while recognising the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. But on the other hand it attacks the Kurdish people in a brutal manner and does not recognise their own right to self-determination.
Mazzantini goes on to explain that the Kurdish guerrilla fighters affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who are attacked with chemical weapons by the Turkish state are the same ones who led the war against the Islamic State and emphasises that they were “hailed as freedom fighters when it came to defeating the army of the [Islamic State] and are now forgotten and betrayed”.
Mentioning a video recently published by the Kurdish guerilla, which claims to show a bomb shell filled with chemicals, that was used by the Turkish army, he repeats the descriptions that are made in the video. The Kurdish woman guerilla is describing the contents of the bomb as having a “strong smell” and explains that “You can see brown, resinous bits mixed with white powder. Chemical weapons are regularly used in guerrilla defence zones. The explosions emit large amounts of white smoke or large mushrooms similar to atomic smoke. Chemical weapons are among the internationally banned weapons”.
Accusing the international community of silence when it comes to the attacks on the Kurdish people, Mazzantinis highlights that “While people are dying in Gaza and Ukraine, we have quickly forgotten about the Kurds who have been dying murdered for decades in the name of the same freedom for which other peoples also die.”
Mazzantini describes the freedom of the Kurdish as “our own freedom, which an allied country of ours poisons with chemical weapons.”. He explains the confident stance of the Turkish state and the European states supporting it, saying that Turkey goes unpunished, and the Turkish state can be “sure that we will turn our eyes the other way and not smell the chemical stench of a colonialist war of extermination and invasion.”
While the relentless Turkish attacks on the Kurdish people are often ignored by the Western media, Mazzantini’s article is a truthful and direct call to the international community to uncover and speak out against the war crimes committed by the Turkish state. His article makes clear that Turkey’s ongoing use of chemical weapons is not just an attack on the Kurdish people, but on all of us.
