With a dramatic appeal about the Situation in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobanê the Kurdish DEM party from Turkey went public on Saturday. The “crisis in Kobanê is turning into a deadly catastrophe”. Children would freeze to death, there would be nothing left to eat, the city would be surrounded and completely closed off from the outside world.
“Around 500,000 people are trapped. There is no more electricity and very little water,” it says. The DEM report describes the situation up to Saturday last week. The siege of the city took place during the ceasefire that the Kurdish leadership led by Mazloum Abdi had negotiated with Syrian interim President Ahmet al-Sharaa for last week.
The ceasefire was extended for 15 days on Saturday evening, but the blockade of Kobanê remains in place. In addition to the DEM, whose co-chair Tülay Hatimogullari visited the remaining Kurdish areas in northern Syria via Iraq on Thursday and Friday and met representatives of the Kurdish self-administration in Hasakah, a number of international aid organizations are also sounding the alarm.
Medico International reports from its partner organization the Kurdish Red Crescent that it is attacked by drone and could not enter Kobanê. Medico has published a dramatic call for help from the two mayors of Kobanê.
The Assad family’s 50-year rule has been history since 2024. Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia after rebels overthrew the regime. The interim government of HTS leader al-Sharaa is currently in office.
“People are being brutally massacred”
“The city is completely surrounded. The HTS surrounded us on three sides. The Turkish border runs to the north. People who approached this border were shot at by Turkish soldiers. The Turkish state and the HTS interim government are bombing the villages around Kobanê. We no longer have contact with these villages. When a village is attacked, the first thing that is cut off is internet access and the phones are confiscated. If there is even the slightest sign of cooperation with the self-government on the phones, the people will be brutally massacred.”
Mayors Emina Weso and Fewaz Ehmed recall that it was the citizens of Kobane who opposed IS in 2014 and repelled the terrorist group after months of fighting. Now they are “again exposed to massacres and the threat of genocide by the Islamist HTS forces.”
HTS fighters would release video threats announcing that they would behead the people of Kobani. The city represents the fight of the Syrian Kurds against IS. They were able to defend the city for months in the winter of 2014/15 and were later supported by US fighter jets.
This led to the alliance of the Kurdish-dominated SDF militias with the USA, which successfully fought IS throughout northeastern Syria after the liberation of Kobanê. Today the US has largely abandoned the Kurds. In the fight for control over Syria, they support interim President Ahmet al-Sharaa, who wants to destroy the Kurds’ self-government, disband the militias and integrate them into a new army.
Humanitarian corridors established
Kobanê plays an important role in this. The city near the Euphrates is like a last exclave, cut off from the other Kurdish areas further east. It is surrounded by government troops and the area to the east that Turkey has occupied for years.
Ahmet al-Sharaa has now, apparently at the urging of the USA, the Extension of the ceasefire agreed. Syria expert Charles Lister also reported on Sunday afternoon that the interim government had agreed to the establishment of two humanitarian corridors to Kobanê and Hasakah. A convoy of 25 trucks with relief supplies set off east from Aleppo to supply Kobanê and Hasakah. The modalities of the handover of the two Kurdish regions are to be negotiated in the next two weeks.