Fréderike Geerdink
Ten years after the Yazidi Genocide, still from time to time news emerges that a girl or woman is rescued out of the clutches of an ISIS member or family. The liberators are often Kurds and members of the Kurdish security forces in Syria, or Yazidi families who manage to trace their daughters in, for example, Turkey. Now, a young woman was rescued from Gaza. Kurds are of course shocked, and some ask difficult questions. Questions I can’t stop thinking about.
In case you missed it, let me share the story shortly. Last week, a 21-year old woman, named Fawzia Amin Sido, was liberated from Gaza in a complicated operation. She had been abducted during the Yazidi Genocide in 2014. After being held in captivity in different places, she was bought by a Palestinian ISIS member, and later, in 2020, trafficked into Gaza. More details in this Rudaw story of more than a year ago, which reportedly triggered the effort to get her out of Gaza. Also CNN has a story, in which also the woman herself was quoted.
To secure her freedom, authorities in Iraq, Jordan, the US and Israel cooperated. It was complicated from the start, but when the genocide in Gaza started, it became even more difficult. Reportedly, eventually her captor died in an Israeli bombing, providing the woman with an opportunity to get out. She was reunited with her family in Iraq.
Behaviour
“Can you now understand why we can’t support the Palestinians?”, a Kurd asked me. A Kurd in the diaspora in Europe told me: “We are angry about the lack of a collective conscience there. A 10-year old girl arrived and nobody wondered what she was doing there? They apparently collectively accepted and tolerated such behaviour.” Another said: “The problem is Islam, don’t you think?” One such message was accompanied by an AI-generated illustration of a girl lead to freedom by an Israeli soldier who was holding her hand. Israel, the humanitarian liberator.
Let me be clear: this is not the common reaction among Kurds. Many are educated well on suppression, power, patriarchal violence – they live it themselves, after all. They recognise what the Palestinians are going through and support them. But since several Kurds contacted me about this and asked such questions, I can’t get around answering them.
Puzzle
No, what happened doesn’t make me understand that you apparently don’t support Palestinians. The Palestinians are not collectively responsible for the girl’s ordeal, and neither are the Gazans specifically. A lack of collective conscience? We don’t even know if anybody besides the direct surroundings of the young woman knew that she was an abducted Yazidi. Also, as far as we know, she didn’t arrive in Gaza right after she was abducted but years later. Are people immediately supposed to understand the backgrounds of the girl? Put together a puzzle without having all the pieces?
And no, Islam in general is not the problem either. A particularly fundamentalist abhorrent interpretation of Islam, yes. To blame the whole of the religion of millions of people worldwide, who practice Islam in an immensely wide variety of ways, is simplistic and, frankly, dangerous. Kurds themselves are majority Muslim and in general not inclined to fundamentalism (although some of them joined ISIS), which could serve as an example of the many ways people can practice the religion, right?
Little Narin
What is painful though, is that blaming Palestinians or Gazans specifically as lacking a collective conscience, is playing right into Israel’s hands. Already, a spokesperson of the Israeli army said that this once again shows that Hamas and ISIS are connected. Not everything that happens in Gaza is ‘Hamas’, and Hamas and ISIS are different organisations, which don’t have good relations. Wouldn’t it be good to recognise that Israel is using a strategy against Palestinians that Turkey uses against Kurds?
I can’t help but think of the murder of little Narin, this summer in Diyarbakır, of which some deluded Hüda-Par official said: “This is not our culture, but Europe’s, America’s, Israel’s. We need to investigate how that culture ended up here.” Know what he meant? He meant to imply that the PKK was involved in Narin’s murder. The rather widely accepted narrative in Turkey is, you need to know, that PKK is not rooted in suppression of Kurds, but a project of foreign powers to weaken and divide Turkey.
Hüda-Par, an islamist party in cahoots with the AKP/MHP government, was trying to shift attention away from the state, and from – we later learned – themselves. Part of Narin’s family, who were Hüda-Par members, are now under investigation for the murder, and many questions need to be answered about possible state complicity.
Wedge
Israel instantly started to use the dramatic story of the young Yazidi woman as a way to smear Hamas, which in their book equals the whole population of Gaza. They portray their soldiers as playing a heroic role in the liberation of the girl, as a distraction from what they are really doing on a day to day basis in Gaza, which is carrying out a genocide – you know, the thing ISIS did. Extra win for Israel is that it is not just anybody who perceives its soldiers as nice humanitarians, but part of the Kurds. Just another wedge between Kurds and Palestinians, whose unity should rightly scare Israel.
Such a wedge is a win for Turkey too, because it’s of course not just Israel’s, but also Erdogan’s biggest fear that the Kurdish and Palestinian people fully unite against their murderers and oppressors, namely fascist states.
Don’t fall into that trap, please. The Yazidi girl survived two genocides and that is close to a miracle. Please don’t let your anger about the crimes against her sow a division between you and other people fighting for freedom and dignity.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
