Syrian Kurdistan takes a different route to the Arab Spring – a first hand experience- audio

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Zaher Baher of the Kurdistan Anarchists Forum spoke at the 2014 London Anarchist Bookfair about the two weeks he spent in Syrian Kurdistan in May 2014, looking at the experiences of self-management in the region, experiments that have become more widely discussed as the result of the defense of Kobane against ISIS. Zaher is also a member of Haringey Solidarity Group

 

Anarchist Eyewitness to self-management in Kurdish Syria / West Kurdistan by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

 

Zaher also wrote at length about his experiences in 'The experiment of West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has proved that people can make changes

The meeting was Organised by the London Anarchist Bookfair and KAF (http://anarchistan.tk) Their description in the program for the bookfair read "A comrade from the Kurdish Anarchist Federation (KAF) and Haringey Solidarity Group has just returned from Syrian Kurdistan. Speaking with numerious people while there, it seems there is a desire to run Western Kurdistan (the Syrian part) along broadly non hierarchical, and dare we say anarchist, lines. As the KAF member says, “The best example the ‘Arab Spring’ produced so far is the ‘movement of the democracy society’ in Syrian Kurdistan. This emerged from the bottom of society where everybody regardless of their nationalities, religions, beliefs and genders came together to build local groups, the ‘house of the people’, neighbourhood committees and the Communes”. This while a war is being raged against them by ISIS."