2019: Hervin Khalaf, Rojava politician
1 comment October 12th, 2020 Headsman
One year ago today, Rojava political figure Hervin Khalaf was killed by summary execution.
A Syrian Kurd whose family counts several martyrs to that people’s long struggle for self-determination, Khalaf (English Wikipedia entry | French was a civil engineer in Al-Malikiyah at the tip of Syria’s furthest-northeast salient wedged between Turkey and Iraq. It’s a heavily multiethnic part of the country; the Assyrian singer Faia Younan hails from the same town.
Amid the ongoing civil war that has fractured the map of Syria, Al-Malikiyah has since 2012 been part of Rojava, a de facto (albeit legally unrecognized) independent heavily-Kurdish polity that has unfolded an appealing secular social revolution featuring women’s rights and democratic devolution. Khalaf personified that vision, fired by the future she was making with her own hands; in an obituary, a friend recalled her rising at 5 in the morning and working until midnight, everything from diplomatic wrangling to teaching mathematics to children. She became the secretary-general of the liberal Future Syria Party.
Rojava has been menaced on all sides throughout its brief existence: initially by the Syrian army, which eventually withdrew amicably to allow both parties to focus on other threats; by the Islamic State; and — of moment to this post — by neighboring Turkey.
Turkey’s long-running conflict with its own Kurdish populace just across the border was of course a concern for Rojava and the Kurdish militias that supported it. When the United States withdrew its forces from northeast Syria in 2019, it laid Rojava open to Turkish invasion — which occurred on October 9, 2019. Days into that attack, an allied local militia of Sunni extremists stopped Khalaf’s armored SUV at a roadside checkpoint and summarily executed both she and her driver, Farhad Ahmed. The murder drew worldwide outrage.
While Rojava’s prospects seemed grim indeed in these days, Russia — stepping into the void as the Kurds’ great power patron — brokered a deal with Turkey that has prevented the region being overrun entirely.
On this day..
- 1942: Mark Retiunin's rebels of the gulag - 2019
- 1789: Five wheelbarrow men - 2018
- 2017: Robert Pruett - 2017
- 1984: Linwood Briley, terror of Richmond - 2016
- 1781: Benjamin Loveday and John Burke, "for the detestable Crime of Sodomy" - 2015
- 1883: Frederick Mann - 2014
- 1435: Agnes Bernauer - 2013
- 1901: Johannes Lotter, Boer War "rebel" - 2012
- 1943: Willi Graf, anti-Nazi medic - 2011
- 1565: Jean Ribault and the Huguenot colonists of Fort Caroline - 2010
- 1888: Pauline McCoy - 2009
- 1915: Nurse Edith Cavell, "patriotism is not enough" - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Execution,History,Kurdistan,Martyrs,No Formal Charge,Politicians,Power,Ripped from the Headlines,Shot,Syria,Turkey,Wartime Executions,Women
Tags: 2010s, 2019, hervin khalaf, october 12, rojava
Recent Comments