I received word on Thursday from my attorney, who I served with overseas when neither of us had a wrinkle on our faces, that my request to host an Afghan family was finally accepted.
A specific Afghan family.
It took longer than expected because of the vetting process for me and the four people, which then became five, that I will be hosting.
I already host two marvelous young people from Honduras i met whilst leaving supplies in the Sonoran Desert, www.dailykos.com/…, which I’ve been doing with a dear friend once or twice a month for over two years now.
One is at a U. S. airbase, but four are still in their home in the city and country that they have always lived, saying goodbye to their home and furnishings and their business.
Saying goodbye to their extended family and friends.
They can no longer stay, because of what they did to their son, husband and father.
Because of oppression and closed opportunities and closed doors.
‘They’ being the Taliban.
No one likes vagueness, least of all me.
But there are psychopathic butchers holding the key at present, and those that I’ll be talking about are still under their control and could suddenly deny emigration or even kill those i will be talking about…..
…. so it appears for the present I will be vague in regards to names.
In a couple of months though, with everyone safe behind our borders, and in the walls of their new home, I can speak freely.
God, I loved their son and father.
He is dead now, murdered by the Taliban a week after they took control of the country.
Let’s refer to him for now as Tarik.
I met him in early 2012, in northern Syria, known among Kurds as Western Kurdistan or Rojava.
Kurds are our brothers and sisters so let’s call it Rojava.
It was in Rojava that I met Tarik, and it was in Rojava that I met an amazing group of people from all across the globe, who left their homes and jobs and families to come to a war- torn location to help brothers and sisters, strangers to them, that were being brutalized and murdered.
First by ISIS, and then by the Turkish Armed Forces.
This group what was later to be named as YPG International…. The Lions of Rojave.
They were to join the YPG, the People’s Protection Units and their sister militia, the Women's Protection Units.
It was founded by Abdullah Öcalan, known as Apo, or Uncle, in the late 1970’s.
He is a thinker, a philosopher, a freedom fighter, and a civil rights activist.
He believed in complete women’s liberation in all ways.
No main religion to kill or die over.
It was set up to protect the legacy and values of the people of Rojava and is founded on the principles of the paradigm of a democratic society, ecology and woman’s liberation. Without preferring or discriminating any religion, language, nation, gender or political parties, to protect the country against all attacks from outside. All missions and work is carried out within the framework of defense and defending the people of Rojava.
Abdullah was captured in Kenya in 1999 and brought to Turkey, where he and all of YPG are regarded as terrorists.
After his capture, he was held in solitary confinement as the only prisoner on İmralı island in the Sea of Marmara. Following the commutation of the death sentence to a life sentence in 2002, he remained imprisoned on İmralı, and is the sole inmate there.
The ways in which Öcalan figures ‘Woman’, serves as metaphor for the Kurdish nation-as-people (not nation-state). In short, if one manages to liberate woman, from the hegemonic ‘civilisation’ of ‘the dominant male’, one manages to liberate, not only the Kurds, but the world. It is only on this basis that the conditions of possibility for a genuine global democratic confederalism, and a solution to the conflicts of the Middle East can be thinkable. Once it is thinkable, then we can imagine a freedom to organise, to be free from any conception of ownership (of property, persons, or the self), a freedom to show solidarity, to restore balance to life, nature, and other humans through ‘love’, not power.
In Rojava, The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Öcalan’s political thoughts are being implemented, negotiated and practised. Such a radical experiment, which connects theory with practice has not been seen on this scale, ever before, and although the Rojava administration, the Democratic Union Party, is different from the PKK, they share the same political leader, Öcalan. Central to this experiment are commitments to feminism, ecology and justice.
When ISIS came, they murdered everyone they didn’t make a sexual slave.
That was until they met the YPG/WPU.
And whilst other armies of other lands retreated in their path, they themselves retreated when met by woman who wouldn’t or couldn’t surrender.
Because surrender would mean not just torture, mass rape and death, but it meant there would be no one to defend their sisters and brothers and elders.
And ISIS believed that being being killed by a woman meant forgoing paradise with virgins, or some such nonsense.
These butchers wanted no part of these fearless protectors and warriors.
They came to lay it all on the line.
Leftists from Turkey and Iran, from Germany and Australia and Finland and Argentina, America, England, France, Canada, Italy, The Netherlands, Israel and on and on.
And that’s why Tarik was there.
His reasoning was two fold.
As a believer of Öcalan’s vision, he wanted to help protect and liberate those terrorized by fascists and monsters.
And if and when the time came, to emulate such a thinking in his own land.
And that was what probably got him killed.
I saw quickly that if I was to stay, I would have no choice but to carry and use arms.
Or be responsible for getting a comrade killed.
But…. that’s not what I’m about.
Remember this?
I was there to help with medical training in the field, locating and procuring medicines and supplies and distributing them to a given populace.
And whatever else was needed for the warriors.
Like more modern weaponry, for at that time these light infantry troops were successfully fighting tanks with older Kalashnikov rifles.
So i eventually physically left the bravest and noblest brothers and sisters that i ever had the good fortune to meet…. and that’s saying something.
Tarik stayed and was there at Mount Sinjar in 2014, where up to as many as 10,000 Yazidis were rescued from genocide at the hands of ISIS, mostly women, children and the elderly, without food, shelter, or resources.
Those still in the town were either being massacred or forced into sexual slavery.
Until their captors were themselves routed, defeated and the few survivors driven out.
I would often receive videos sent by Tarik, years after he returned home, of fallen comrades who witnessed the suffering of others and made it their own, and who would be killed trying to protect their new family thousands of miles away from their homelands.
We met up in Europe in 2016, rented a Sprinter and we travelled together for a month.
We were an odd site when coming upon us in the morning, he on his prayer blanket in supplication and I a few yards away donning tefillin.
I suppose we were.
We knew that if and when American forces withdrew, the paid forces would fold like a deck of cards…. and so they did.
I spoke with him multiple times before the withdrawal about the plans for the family and whatever assistance needed.
He felt safe enough, his younger sister safely in France.
It was a week after the Taliban took control that they came to his home, which was shared with his parents, his wife and child, and he was taken away.
It was truly unexpected.
He was not an anarchist or did he express anti Taliban sentiment.
He worked his business for ten hours a day and came home to be with his family.
Why, this killer of the Taliban’s enemy ISIS, was taken, and found dead and mutilated on a dusty roadside is up for conjecture.
Suffice it to say, it completely destroyed his mother.
His father.
His wife and child.
And because that is what he wanted in case of such a dire situation, his mother and father and wife and child will soon be here, joined by his wife’s sister who is at an airbase.
And maybe his sister in France will join her family.
They would have left everything they owned and knew to start a new life in this strange country that has freedoms unknown to much of the world.
But which they tasted and lived, and once you taste and live freedom….
They have sufficient savings at their disposal which is blessedly rare amongst most in their situation.
I have a guest house on the other side of my property…. it’s there I will predominantly move into.
They will stay in the main house.
It has antiques that the mother once collected and has given away, a piano that the father will play for the family every night as he has for decades on his own, and on the walls of her new bedroom, she can look upon the pictures of her son already in place.
The face of love.
( He introduced me to the Islamic devotional music of Pakistan known as qawwali. I introduced him to Eddie Vedder. Here they are together. )
Years ago, i asked him on a Zoom call why he always wore black.
He sent this to me a few days later.
A brand new chapter, friends.
I pray for some facilitation for some semblance of…… healing?…... for a grief- filled family in a foreign land.
The unknown for everyone.
They’ve got each other.
And to honour my friend.
You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.
Shalom aleichem. As Salaam Alaikum. Namaste. Blessed be.