Ashok Kondabolu

Who are we? Let me tell you, America! We are the Kurds you betrayed in Rojava, north-east Syria, your anti-ISIS coalition partners. You sold us to Turkey in 2018, which annexed our Kurdish city of Afrin for allied jihadist factions. Then again in 2019, when our cities of Sere Kaniye and Gire Spi were handed over to Turkey for “security concerns,” even though not a single bullet from Rojava had been fired toward Turkey. And once more in 2026, when you handed us over to the former ISIS and al-Qaeda Syrian regime under the extreme hardliner al-Jolani. Thousands of us were massacred, ethnically cleansed, hunted street by street. Our women fighters were beheaded, their braids cut as war trophies by jihadist men. We are the Kurds you betrayed in Basur, northern Iraq, who held a popular referendum in 2017, winning by 92% to separate from Iraq, a country that had ethnically cleansed and murdered us for years, only for our freedom to be denied. The Iraqi central government, encouraged by your condemnation of our referendum, attacked us and forcibly took over our Kurdish city of Kirkuk. Our peshmerga forces were run over by Iraqi tanks. Even now, Iraqi forces continue forcing Kurds out of their homes, as they have since the 1960s, because the city is oil-rich. We are the same Kurds in northern Iraq whom you urged to stand up against the Saddam regime in 1991, only to abandon us when we rose up. We were massacred, and 2 million of us were displaced. You were shamed into Operation “Provide Comfort,” but only after thousands of us had already been killed following your call to rise. We are the Kurds in Bakur, western Turkey whose lives and bodies have been sacrificed because of your economic and military ties to Turkey- your NATO allies who built a jihadi corridor and openly supports ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Nusra. We are the same Kurds in Rojhilat whom you betrayed during the 1975 Algiers Agreement. The Kurdish uprising collapsed overnight; tens of thousands were displaced. Iraqi forces launched severe reprisals—those who witnessed what had happened to our fellow Kurds in Basur and Rojava now refuse to be your foot soldiers. We know who you are, America. But it’s no wonder- despite this long and painful history of betrayal- that YOU still don’t know who we are. The oppressed carry the memory of every wound, but the oppressor forgets the scars it has inflicted.