An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck a large area including 13 provinces in Turkey and the Syrian provinces of Idlib and Aleppo at 4.27am on 6 February. The first tremor, which had its epicentre in the Kurdish district of Pazarcik in Kahramanmaras province, lasted about 100 seconds. It was followed by a 7.5 magnitude aftershock at 13:24 local time that lasted 45 seconds and a multitude of other less powerful aftershocks causing unprecedented human and material damage.
The official human toll at the end of February was 50,399 dead and 107,204 injured in Turkey and 8,476 dead and 143,803 injured in Syria. According to observers quoted by LE MONDE on 13 February, the death toll could reach 100,000. Of the 23 million inhabitants of the 13 provinces affected, nearly 7 million children, including 4.6 million in Turkey and 2.5 million in Syria, are affected according to a UNICEF report quoted in an AFP dispatch of 14 February (see also LE MONDE of 14.2). About 301,000 buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged. Numerous industrial infrastructures, sewage systems, schools, hospitals and administrative buildings have not withstood these powerful earthquakes. The partially destroyed port of Alexandrette became unusable. More than 5 million inhabitants fled the disaster area, 350,000 had to be evacuated by train.
According to the very first estimates, the material damage is estimated at 85 billion dollars. For the World Health Organisation (WHO), quoted by AFP on 14 February, this is the “worst natural disaster in a century in Europe”.
The most affected province is Antakya, the ancient Antioch on the Orontes River of Greek antiquity, which was one of the four largest cities of the Roman Empire. Its exceptional architectural and historical heritage, including the earliest churches in Christendom, Greek and Roman remains, and Crusader works, was almost totally destroyed. Among the 21,910 dead counted at the end of February in this province with an Alawite Arab majority, thousands of Syrian refugees who had thought they were rebuilding their lives there were buried under the rubble of so-called “modern” residences built in a hurry without any respect for anti-seismic standards.
The epicentre of the earthquake, the predominantly Kurdish Alevi province of Marach (Kahramanmaras), has a very provisional death toll of 12,622 and 9,247 injured, but most of its rubble has not yet been explored. The city of Semsûr (Adiyaman), home of the great Latin writer Lucian of Samosata, nestled at the foot of the ancient site of Nemrud Dagh, populated by Kurds, has also been reduced to rubble with a death toll of 6,013 and 17,500 injured. The cosmopolitan city of Gaziantep (Dilok) also suffered 3,897 dead and 25,276 wounded, while Malatya, with a Kurdish majority, suffered 1,393 dead and 9,214 wounded.
In the face of the scale of the disaster, there was widespread criticism of the Turkish state’s negligence. During the first two or three days of the earthquake, which were so critical for saving lives, help was absent in most of the disaster areas. The state was absent, and the army, so quick to mobilise for external operations, was absent. Thousands of victims froze to death at the foot of their destroyed homes, abandoned to their fate, without shelter, blankets or food. Criticism became so widespread and virulent that the government cut off access to social networks for 12 hours, which led to a dramatic drop in calls for help from the victims and further aggravated the toll. Three television channels (HALK TV, FFOX, TELE-1) were heavily sanctioned on 20 February for their critical coverage of the plight of earthquake victims. Although weakened and closely monitored, civil society mobilised to provide first aid. In Diyarbakir, for example, a group of more than sixty NGOs and socio-professional associations, such as the Bar Association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Union of Doctors, the Union of Architects and Engineers, formed to send food, blankets, tents and construction equipment to the areas most affected by the earthquake. In Diyarbakir alone, where the earthquake left 414 people dead, a thousand injured and tens of thousands homeless, the collective served 200,000 meals a day for several days before the government’s disaster agency, APAD, took over. The municipalities of the Kurdish cities, whose elected mayors were replaced by Ankara-appointed officials, remained inactive during the disaster.
Created after the 1999 earthquake in the Marmara region, which killed 17,000 people, the richly endowed governmental relief agency APAD, headed by an incompetent cleric appointed by Erdogan, has also shown its negligence in the chaotic management of the crisis and in the erratic coordination of more than 11,500 rescue workers coming from a hundred countries with professional rescue equipment. Turkish television channels have extensively publicised the modest help of “brotherly Turkish countries” such as Azerbaijan or Kyrgyzstan, while ignoring that of France or the 200 American rescue workers. Iraqi Kurdistan, which sent the very first convoys of humanitarian aid and rescue workers to Turkey and Syria, was ignored by the official media. A major Turkish TV station reporting on the distribution of aid from Kurdistan referred to aid from Qatar. Addressing each rescue team to thank them in their own language, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlud Çavusoglu failed to say “spas”, thank you, in Kurdish. This provoked a reaction from his predecessor Ahmet Davutoglu, former Prime Minister, who said “spas to our friends from Kurdistan”.
The President of Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, was the first “foreign” leader to visit the area and meet with victims in several places in relative discretion. The Greek Foreign Minister’s visit, followed by that of Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, was covered by the media. On this occasion, the latter announced an additional $100 million in humanitarian aid on top of an initial $85 million for the victims.
During his visit to Ankara, the US Secretary of State, in addition to his Turkish counterpart, met with the Turkish President and warned him of the consequences of Turkey’s circumvention of Western sanctions against Russia. Turkey is the only NATO member state not to apply the sanctions and to welcome Russian oligarchs. It has doubled its trade with Moscow since the start of the war in Ukraine and serves as a hub for sanctions circumvention. Washington remains opposed to any further Turkish incursion into Syria and takes a dim view of the Russian-led process of rapprochement between Ankara and Baghdad.
While the earthquake has brought some relief to Turkey’s tumultuous relations with Greece and Europe, its consequences in Turkish politics could prove fatal to Erdogan’s long reign. Erdogan came to power by denouncing the negligence of the Turkish state during the 1999 earthquake and promising that the country would “never again be caught unawares by our natural disasters”. In addition to creating a specialised disaster management and relief agency, AFAD, packed with Islamic supporters to compete with the century-old secular Turkish Red Crescent, he introduced an anti-seismic tax to finance the retrofitting of dilapidated buildings. More than 40 billion of this tax collected since then have been used for other purposes in a most total opacity denounced by the opposition. No serious rehabilitation programme has been implemented. The warnings issued since 2016 by seismologists about the imminence of a 7.5 magnitude earthquake on the Maras-Antakya fault have been ignored. Worse, for electoral reasons, the Turkish government since 2002 has promulgated a dozen laws granting amnesty to illegal or non-compliant constructions in return for a fine without requiring prior compliance. The largest amnesty was enacted in 2018. More than 7 million buildings have been built, for the most part, without building permits and without any inspection of compliance with anti-seismic standards, a practice considered “benevolent” and popular in a country where Erdogan’s own 1,100-room presidential palace was built without a building permit, with the tragic consequences that the government presents to its pious voters as the will of God against which it could do nothing.
Critics continue to shout that it is not the earthquake, but the negligence of a state riddled with corruption, nepotism and clientelism, that kills. The 7.3 magnitude earthquakes in 2021 and 2022 killed a few people in Japan and the 7.8 magnitude earthquake probably killed more than 100,000 in Turkey. Voters will make their judgement on 14 May.
The 6 February earthquake hit Syria’s north-eastern provinces hard, leaving more than 8,560 people dead, according to a provisional and incomplete estimate. Makeshift dwellings built in haste to accommodate millions of people displaced by the war that has raged in the country since 2011 collapsed, burying under the rubble their inhabitants who had been exhausted by years of wandering and misery. Access to these regions under Turkish occupation, such as Afrin or Al-Bab canton, or controlled by the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, supported by Turkey, such as Idlib province, remained very difficult at least during the first ten days of the earthquake. The victims had to search for their relatives in the rubble with the means at their disposal.
A week after the earthquake, the UN said it had obtained Damascus’ agreement to open two additional crossing points between Turkey and north-western Syria for three months: Bab al-Salama and al-Rai. Most of the international aid has been channelled through the Bab al-Hawa crossing, the only one recognised and guaranteed by a UN Security Council resolution. According to an AFP dispatch of 20 February, “planes loaded with humanitarian aid are flying into Damascus” and the UN has indicated that it “has sent a total of nearly 200 trucks of aid to north-eastern Syria since the earthquake”. A drop in the ocean, given that according to Médecins sans Frontières, quoted by AFP, the weekly average of humanitarian aid to this region populated by more than 4 million people was 145 trucks last year. In normal times, 90% of this displaced population depends on humanitarian aid for its survival.
The chaos that reigns in these rebel zones ruled by armed Islamist militias constitutes a major obstacle to the distribution of aid to the most needy. Thus, the very first convoy sent via the Turkish border to the canton of Afrin by the Barzani Foundation was very quickly captured by the local armed militias, according to numerous testimonies. In Idlib, too, the families of militiamen from the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), presented as the “former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda”, are served first, as well as their relatives. For its part, despite its promises to send international humanitarian aid received in Damascus to the stricken rebel areas, the Syrian government, with its usual cynicism, is diverting a large part of this aid to its own supporters.
On 15 February, the UN Secretary General launched an “emergency appeal for donations” of nearly 400 million dollars for the victims of the earthquake in Syria. This will cover a three-month period, said Antonio Guterres, quoted by AFP.
Following the earthquake, humanitarians and journalists were finally able to gain temporary access to the Turkish-occupied Kurdish canton of Afrin and to see the extent to which the territory is now arabised. Some thirty relocation camps for displaced Arabs, set up by Turkey, complete the Turkish system of demographic change which allows the many jihadist militias that are the Turkish army’s auxiliary forces to chase the Kurdish inhabitants out of their homes, their villages and their businesses and replace them with their relatives. The district of Jinderes, hard hit by the earthquake, was still more than 90% Kurdish a few years ago and has become a deformed and chaotic agglomeration of refugee camps and barracks populated by militiamen, their families and other displaced Arab Islamists from the suburbs of Damascus or other Syrian cities. Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are going to finance vast residential areas to house displaced Syrian Arabs, to complete the Arabisation of the region. Their indulgence does not extend to welcoming them into their homes in the name of pan-Arab solidarity.
The Prime Minister of Kurdistan, Masrour Barzani, made an official visit to Paris during which he was received on 16 February at the Elysée Palace by President Emmanuel Macron.
On the agenda for discussion were the situation in Kurdistan and Iraq, relations between Erbil and Baghdad and the state of the joint war against ISIS. France has continued to give the Kurdistan Region political and diplomatic support for years. It was the first Western country to open a consulate general in Erbil in 2008. Within the framework of the international coalition against ISIS, it has provided significant military support to the Kurdish Peshmergas. President François Hollande was the first Western Head of State to visit Kurdistan where he went, together with President Masoud Barzani, to the frontline of the war against ISIS. Since then, the French Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defence have repeatedly visited Kurdistan. President Macron, during the great crisis following the Kurdish self-determination referendum of October 2017, between Erbil and Baghdad, played a much appreciated role of mediator. The official exchanges were followed by numerous visits by French parliamentarians and academics to the region.
Franco-Kurdish relations are therefore at a good level, as the Prime Minister of Kurdistan recalled. During his short visit, he was also received at length by the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, who spoke of “France’s debt to the Kurdish people who have made so many sacrifices in our common fight against ISIS”. He also thanked the Kurdish government for its protection of Christians and other minorities.
The Mayor of Paris, Mrs Anne Hidalgo, also received the Prime Minister and her delegation at the Hôtel de Ville. She recalled her two visits to Kurdistan and the cooperation between Paris and the Kurdish capital Erbil, a “sister city”, which she included in the vast network of Paris’ partner cities. Talking about the future, she said that she would “soon” be going to Kurdistan to continue and develop cooperation between Paris and Erbil.
Also in February, the President of Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, attended the Munich Security Conference held from 17 to 19 February. He met the Foreign Ministers of the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway and Qatar, as well as the President of the European Commission, the President of Azerbaijan, the Prime Ministers of Armenia, Poland and Iraq.
Kurdistan attaches great importance to diplomacy in order to make itself known and to assert its international status as a reliable partner in the war against ISIS, in the protection of Eastern Christians and in the stabilisation of Iraq.
On the domestic front, Kurdish news was marked by the publication of two important ordinances on the use of the Kurdish language in the region. The first orders the setting up of Kurdish language courses for foreign workers living in Kurdistan. The Ministers of Higher Education and of Education are called upon to prepare, in partnership with the Kurdish Academy and experts, an adapted and effective teaching programme.
The second ordinance recalls the law on the official language of the Kurdistan Region and states: “all ministries must take the necessary measures for the use of the Kurdish language in all government institutions, in the consulates of foreign countries, in foreign companies and organisations and private sector institutions established in Kurdistan”. In addition, “all shops must have signs in Kurdish, restaurants must have menus in Kurdish and leisure facilities must have guides in Kurdish”.
Due to the influx of hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqi Arabs, as well as thousands of non-Kurdish speaking foreign workers, the implementation of these measures was long awaited by the population for a better integration of these immigrants
In the 5th month of the protest movement, which has shaken the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the repression continues to rage. In addition to arrests, abductions, torture, coerced confessions, convictions and executions, the Iranian authorities, in search of new methods of repression, have resorted to the poisoning of young schoolgirls. In an article published on 27 February on the France Info website, we read: “The Iranian authorities have confirmed the existence of deliberate poisoning of hundreds of young girls in their schools since the end of November, without giving further details”.
The phenomenon of poisoning of pupils started on 19 December in a girls’ school in Qom. In the recent period similar cases have been reported in other cities, including Borujerd, Tehran and Ardabil. According to local Iranian media, a few hundred girls have suffered mysterious ailments in their schools in several Iranian cities since late November. The schoolgirls claim gas poisoning. Speaking to a regional television station, some of them described their symptoms, which are always the same: headaches, dizziness...
Under pressure from concerned parents, the authorities finally investigated and gave an explanation. According to them, the girls were intentionally poisoned. The authorities did not give further details and did not make any arrests. The perpetrators could be religious extremists with the aim of closing down girls’ schools. Could this be a way to extinguish the current protest against the regime? Schoolgirls are at the forefront of the protests.
As for ordinary repression, Human Rights Watch has documented the use by security forces of shotguns, assault rifles, and handguns against demonstrators in largely peaceful settings. It pointed out on 3 February that “security forces systematically target the eyes of demonstrators” and stated that it had documented 22 cases of demonstrators being blinded by security force fire, including nine female victims.
The situation in Iranian Kurdistan continues to deteriorate. In an article entitled: “The Kurds of Iran, victims of a ferocious repression by the Tehran regime” published on 31 January in the newspaper Le Monde, Ghazale Golshiri reports that young Iranian Kurds have been victims of violence since the beginning of the uprising against the Iranian regime. The autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan has become a refuge for Iranians pursued and sought by the security services.
On 7 February, a 14-year-old Kurdish teenager was arrested by security forces in Oshnovieh, a Kurdish town in West Azerbaijan province. The human rights NGO Hengaw reported the death on Saturday 11 February of Hossein Mohammadi (Talan) from Rabat, Sardasht district, killed by direct fire from Revolutionary Guards.
According to Hengaw, the border police shot several Kolbars (porters) at the border of Sardasht with Iraqi Kurdistan on Friday 10 February 2023, at 10pm. As a result of the shooting a Kolbar identified as Hossein Mohammadi, married with two children, died on the spot.
On 16 February Hengaw reported that seven prisoners from the Kurdish town of Oshnavieh, Hayman (Karvan) Shahiparvaneh, Faryad Hameshor, Farzad Mohammadpour, Shahram Maarouf Mola, Reza Islam Dost and brothers Farhad and Farzad Tahazadeh are being held in Urmia prison. According to a well-informed source, these prisoners have been subjected to psychological torture on several occasions, in particular the spectacle of real or mock executions of presumed convicts under physical duress, with the specific aim of undermining their morale and undermining the psychological foundation on which their conscience is based and which enables them to resist adversity. These Oshnavieh prisoners had been arrested in the context of demonstrations and popular uprisings and, after a series of harsh interrogation sessions, were transferred to Urmia prison. They are described as “muharibeh” (at war with God)
Under the Islamic penal code “muharibeh” and “corruption on earth” are punishable by death.
On 17 February, as a result of direct fire by border police on a group of kolbars, Nemat Azizi from the Kurdish town of Nowsud, Kermanshah province, was seriously injured.
In 2022, 162 Kurdish porters, engaged in border trade with Iraqi Kurdistan, were killed on the border of Kermanshah (Kirmashan) province, a figure that is 179% higher than in 2021.
On Sunday 19 February 2023 Jila Hojabri, a Marivan activist who was arrested last summer in Bukan by Iranian security forces, was sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict was officially announced for “collaboration and membership of the Free Life Party of Kurdistan” (PJAK).
According to a report released by Hengaw on 20 February, Vafa Azarbar, 27, from Bukan, Mohsen Mazlum, 28, from Mahabad, Pejman Fatihi, 28, from Kamiyaran and Mohammad Faramarzi, 28, from Dehgolan, were all detained for seven months and denied access to basic rights such as the right to appoint a lawyer or to receive visits. The four citizens were arrested in the village of Yengejeh in the Soma and Bradost districts of Urmia. They are all members of the Komala party. Mohsen Mazlum’s wife, Jwana Taymesi, recently expressed her concern by posting a video about the recent condition of these four political prisoners and called on the international community and Iranian citizens to take action to dissuade the Iranian judiciary from heavily punishing them.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s television had broadcast the forced confessions of these four political prisoners for the second time on Monday 5 December 2022. The complaints filed by the Iranian intelligence ministry raise fears of harsh sentences.
On 21 February, Soheila Mohammadi, from Salmas, who had been imprisoned in Urmia central prison for two years, committed suicide after her request for amnesty was rejected. Her application had been rejected due to systematic obstruction by Revolutionary Guard officials. Aged 30, she had been arrested in Salmas in the autumn of 2020 by the intelligence services of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and after several months of interrogation, she was transferred to the women’s section of the central prison of Urmia.
On 17 February, in Sanandaj, after Friday prayers, the Kurds protested against the arrest of the Sunni cleric Ibrahim Karimi, imam of the mosque of the village of Nanleh, chanting “Death to Khamenei”, “Death to the dictator”, “Kurds, Baluchis and Azeris, freedom and equality”, “Death to the Pasdaran, death to the Basijis”, “Free the political prisoners”, “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader (Khamenei)”.
In addition, the people of Sardasht held a massive protest rally against the arrest of Fathullah Rostami, the Sunni imam of the Friday prayer of Mareghan village, and demanded his release. Rostami was arrested on his way to Khoi to help the people of the earthquake-affected town.
On 20 February 2023, Imam Jafar Parvini and Imam Ali Rahimi, both from the Kurdish town of Piranshahr, were summoned by the intelligence service in that town. Ali Rahimi, the imam of the Friday prayer, was released after a long interrogation session, and Jafar Parvini, a teacher at the Salahuddin (Saladin) Ayoubi School of Religious Sciences in Piranshahr, was arrested and transferred to an unknown location.
According to a 21 February 2023 report by the NGO Hengaw, 186 Kurdish children, including 32 girls, had been arrested during the peaceful protests in Iran. These children were abducted from the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, West Azerbaijan and Ilam, and the city of Javanrud recorded the highest number of arrested children (28 children).
21 children in Sanandaj and 14 in Saqqez were arrested. According to the NGO the number of children and students arrested is over 400.
On 22 February 2023, Sarkawt Ahmadi (Arash), a activist from Ravansar, was secretly executed in Dizel Abad prison, Kermanshah. Sarkawt Ahmadi, 29, a political activist and former member of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, was arrested by Iranian security forces in January 2021, when he was no longer a member of this organisation and wanted to travel to Europe via Urmia. He was then transferred to the intelligence detention centre in Kermanshah. He was accused of the murder of a policeman named Hassan Maleki.
On 21 February, 3 Kurdish citizens from Bukan, Mohammad Faraji, 20, Afshin Rasouli, 27, and Reza Mohammadreza, 20, were abducted by Iranian security forces and taken to an unknown location.
The Iranian intelligence services in Urmia contacted Mohammad Faraji, a garage owner, asking him to come to a specific place to repair a car. The citizen immediately went there and was kidnapped. Mohammad Faraji had already been kidnapped on Saturday 14 January by Iranian intelligence forces in Bukan and taken to an unknown location. He was released from the detention centre of this organisation last week.
Afshin Rasouli and Reza Mohammadreza, two other Kurdish citizens from Bukan, were abducted by Iranian security forces together with Mohammad Faraji in the Mirabad district and taken to an unknown location.
In the rest of Iran, repression is also rampant. On 21 February a Tehran court sentenced to death an Iranian-German dissident, Jamshid Sharmand, 67, who had been kidnapped and brought to Iran by force. German Foreign Minister Baerboch said that the possible application of this sentence “would lead to a significant reaction from Berlin” (Le Figaro of 22 February). Threats that have little chance of having an impact on the conduct of the Iranian government, any more than those of London where a private television channel, Iran-International TV, announced on 8 February that it had to close its offices “following recurrent intimidation by the Iranian services against its journalists”. In addition, Washington accused Iran of harbouring the head of Al Qaeda, Seif al-Adel, a former officer in the Egyptian special forces. The United States put a 10 million dollar bounty on the head of this terrorist leader involved in the American attacks in Tanzania and Kenya which killed 224 civilians and injured more than 5,000 people (Challenge of 16 February).
Iran has also adopted a series of sanctions against prominent European figures in retaliation for new targeted sanctions adopted on 20 February by the European Union.
Mrs Vassilyeva, who was one of the pillars of Soviet and Russian Kurdology, died on 15 February in St Petersburg at the age of 89.
She was born on 22 December 1935 in Novgograd and moved with her family to Leningrad in 1944. She began her studies in 1953 at the prestigious Faculty of Orientalism of Leningrad University and graduated in 1958 with a degree in Near and Middle Eastern History. She then joined the Institute of Orientalism of the Soviet Academy where she defended her state doctoral thesis on the History of the Kurdish Ardalan dynasty in the 18th-19th centuries in 1977. In 1991 she published in Moscow a reference monograph on the History of Eastern Kurdistan (of Iran) at the beginning of the 17th century, “History of the Ardalan and Baban princes”. In 2003, she published in St. Petersburg another reference monograph entitled “Sharaf Khan Bidlisi: his time and his life”, on the author of “Sharafnama or Fastes of the Kurdish nation”, completed in 1596, the first general history of the Kurds.
She also translated and critically edited in Russian the “Sharafnama” by Sharaf Khan of Bidlis in two volumes, Moscow 1967 and 1976, as well as published a facsimile of the original “History of the Ardalan Dynasty” by Khosrew Beni Ardalan, followed by its translation into Russian with a beautiful preface and critical notes, Moscow 1984, 219 p. She also translated into Russian the “Chronicle of the House of Ardalan” by the Kurdish princess and historian Mah Sharaf Khanim Kurdistani.
A scholar and polyglot, this passionate orientalist and kurdologist continued her work on the Kurds, in particular on Iranian Kurdistan, until an advanced age, publishing numerous articles in Soviet journals. Her latest book “The Partition of Kurdistan, 1514-1914, Kurdish Tragedy” was published in Russian in 2017 in St Petersburg.
Mrs. Vassilyeva has left her mark on kurdology, especially on the Kurdish historiography of her time. Her death is a great loss for Kurdish studies.
