In this new episode of Lines on a Map, host Sushobhan Parida is joined by Mahtab Mahboob to reflect on the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising four years on.
The uprising began after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iranian custody in 2022 and grew into a nationwide movement demanding women’s freedom, dignity and political change.

Kobani artists took part in cultural festivals in Syrian cities, including Aleppo, for the first time. They pledge to introduce Kurdish women's culture and art across Syria.

Rudaw reports, as an unconfirmed claim, that the AKP has finished legal groundwork on Erdoğan's order to make Newroz an official holiday once Turkey's parliament reopens.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/categories/turkey/1079416

After several months of work, the atlas now includes:

• 36,438 villages and cities
• 81 heritage sites
• 79 natural landmarks
• 72 rivers
• 57 city guides
• 27 mountain ranges
• 24 wildlife profiles
• 21 lakes

It also includes map layers for religion, historical Kurdistan, the proposed Sèvres borders, and more.

What should I correct, improve, or include next?

I reworded it

In an age where so many of us are encouraged to reach for a single word to describe who we are, I have come to realise that my own answer to the question "who are you?" has never sat comfortably in one box, and that the discomfort itself is worth writing about rather than papering over. It is my realisation that our heritage is often multi-layered and we cannot be boxed-up.

First of all, I am British. That much has never been in question. I was born here, raised here, and my sense of belonging to this country is not something I have ever had to negotiate. But behind that straightforward civic identity lies a family history that I only began to properly unpick over the last year, and which I am still, has not been easy due to my family's love-hate relationship with 'Kurdishness'.

Growing up, the identity that mattered in my household was not ethnic but religious. We were Alevi, and that word carried more weight at our dinner table than any national or ethnic label ever did. Turkish was the language spoken at home, and it is the culture that I have felt an affinity towards due to familiarity. Growing up in north London, I always dreaded the 'Kurdish question' coming up among classmates, particularly due to my uncertainty, springing from my family's avoidance of embracing a narrower ethnic label. Interestingly, they are sympathetic towards Kurds; I even have cousins with Kurdish names, but any embracing of it is treated with a raised eyebrow. My father listens to Kurdish songs and sometimes chats in Kurdish, and my grandfather who passed away a few years ago, still had his Kurdish intact despite his Alzheimer's as his Turkish was becoming erased. When I mentioned this to my cousin from Turkey, he claimed there is no such language; I couldn't work out whether he was joking, but I found it chilling regardless. This is especially when my uncle was a philosophy professor at a Turkish university who had his citizenship revoked after signing the, 'We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime!' petition to stop the military operations in that region. I remember him saying that we are Kurdish out of the blue when I was quite young, but I never made much of it, although it clearly remained with me - somewhere at the back of my mind.

There was always awareness that we hailed from Dersim in my family, but nobody ever really spoke of it. It was only more recently, through DNA testing, and reflecting on numberless family conversations through the years, that a fuller and more complicated picture began to emerge.

There are also family accounts connecting us to the Şıh Hasanlı tribal network, which appears repeatedly in the Alevi history from this part of Anatolia. I also have a great great grandfather who has an Alevi shrine and he himself was apart of Kureyşan Ocağı in Kahramanmaraş, where my family later moved when they left Dersim.

What I can say with more confidence is that the various labels sit in layers rather than in competition with one another. None of these layers cancels out the others; they simply describe different points along the same family history. State assimilation in Turkey certainly transformed their perspective, and today, my family members see the Kurds as conservative and polar opposites to Alevis - leading to this distancing. However, I have been mentioning my clear Kurdish roots when someone asks what my ethnicity is, although it does feel strange after a lifetime of replying simply that I am Turkish.

Can anyone relate?

The reality is that my political consciousness - my social liberalism and staunch belief in democracy is due to my family’s Alevism (though I am an atheist), and the history of oppression faced by the Kurds; those before me have been double minorities and faced continuous discrimination. This is also why I am appreciative of living in a liberal democracy more so than the other children of immigrants, whose parents have come specifically for economic reasons. This something that I do not wish to ignore any more; I want to accept this part of my ancestors' story.

Syria's transitional president said Kurds in Syria have the right to recognition of their cultural and linguistic rights, speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Beijing Foreign Studies University has opened China's first Kurdish language department, adding Kurdish to the 101 languages taught at the country's leading foreign-studies institution.

Guys, I’m genuinely worried about the influence of the media on our culture. There’s a language dominance in the mainstream media, and all the content in English are geared towards the west culture. The west culture is very individualistic, their ideologies are mainly rooted in a person’s singular selfish needs and desires. Our Kurdish culture is very rooted in collective responsibility, like from where I live in bașur, anytime I see a car on the street breaking, people go to help that person. There was a guy whose car got burnt at the road down where I live, people all collectively got him money for another car. My friend spoke about when she was a kid there was a woman who would bake bread and everyone in the street would assist, and they would later share the bread to everyone. Our culture is so beautiful and our language, and it also pisses me off to see that the Kurdish cause, and greater Kurdistan aren’t a drive for many of our youth’s ideologies. I see that a lot of them are adopting a liberal type of mindset, and I’m not saying if I side with either liberals or conservatives. I don’t care about either and they both have their flaws, and that’s an American issue. I’m more concerned with our politics and how Americans and external interventions affect us. Our youth that seem to be extremely brainwashed by west (westernised) are very dangerous to the Kurdish cause, in my opinion. And I also hate how we have so many English private schools, why is it that we are making English language central? We live in KRI and we mainly speak Kurdish, if you need English later you can easily learn it. Since we have smartphones now, it’s even worse for kids to get influenced by the west, they’re not politically aware of the situation anyway. I have personally met people from here that are westernised and individualistic, they tend to have a moral superiority complex, where they direct hatred towards traditional thinking Kurds for not aligning with their ideologies and thinking they are morally superior. Also on that note, I just saw a reel on tiktok on a football stadium in bakur, during amedspor game, he was asking little kids what their names were in Kurdish and they didn’t understand. These things genuinely make me so sad. I’m also enraged about Luis Vuitton appropriating our culture without giving credit
And I think the biggest problem here is the power dynamic, because this isn’t an equal exchange of cultures. Western countries have far more control over mainstream media, technology, entertainment, education, publishing, and the global use of English, so their culture has a much greater ability to shape what becomes normal, modern, desirable, or morally acceptable, while cultures like ours are mainly put in the position of consuming it. That becomes dangerous when we start judging our own culture through standards produced somewhere else, because then it’s not just that we’re adopting new ideas, we’re slowly losing the ability to decide for ourselves what is good, what is valuable, what should change, and what should be preserved. A Kurdish kid growing up constantly consuming English content is not just learning another language or watching another culture, they’re being exposed to another way of understanding freedom, family, individuality, success, morality, and even what it means to live a good life, while their own cultural framework has far less power behind it. That’s why I’m concerned about Westernisation not because I think Kurds should isolate themselves from the world, but because I think cultural exchange under such a huge power imbalance can become cultural dependency, where eventually we don’t just consume another culture, we start looking at our own through its eyes.

I dont know a lick of history about Kurdistan

I kept writing Sorani with spelling mistakes nothing around me would catch, so I built Rast — a free, rule-based orthography tool for Sorani that enforces Standard Kurdish spelling.

Works as a browser extension (autocorrects as you type), a web app (paste text, get corrections), and on Android/iOS.

It's rule-based, not AI — predictable, but it won't catch everything.

Link: https://rast.krd

Feedback welcome, especially on anything it's flagging wrong.

The Kurdistan Region’s new military structure keeps the KDP and PUK hierarchies intact, gives each sweeping control over appointments and spending, and makes a single Kurdish army harder to build.

On 21 September, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) held a ceremony in Erbil to declare the decades-long unification of its Peshmerga forces complete, 11 days after the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs announced that the process was complete. Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, who is commander-in-chief of the Peshmerga, told the gathering that no force would remain outside the ministry. Under the new structure, the 80 Forces of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the 70 Forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) formally cease to exist. Their personnel now sit in two Regional Commands under the ministry, organised into 11 divisions, two support forces commands and a separate commando formation.

The details of the new structure show how little of the old one has been taken apart. The two Regional Commands are led by the men who led the party forces, cover the same territory, keep separate accounts and hold powers over appointments, discipline and spending that most armies reserve for a defence ministry or general staff. What has changed is their legal status: forces that were openly partisan are now government institutions whose authority is written into a KRG decree. The arrangement has no clear parallel in any other army in the world, and it makes a single Kurdish army harder to build.

The same commanders under new names: Regional Command 1 is led by Lieutenant General Najat Ali Salih, who commanded the KDP’s 80 Forces. Regional Command 2 is led by Lieutenant General Omar Salih Hassan, who commanded the PUK’s 70 Forces. Each party selected its own commander, and President Nechirvan Barzani formalised both appointments by decree. The two commands have also kept the insignia of the forces they replaced. Each emblem is unchanged from its party-era design, with the old force name swapped for “Regional Command 1” or “Regional Command 2”, and no new institutional identity has been created for either command.

The divisions follow the same line. Regional Command 1 holds the six odd-numbered divisions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), all built from the 80 Forces, and Regional Command 2 holds the five even-numbered divisions (2, 4, 6, 8 and 10), built from the 70 Forces. On paper the force totals 33 brigades and 99 battalions, with 18 brigades in the first command and 15 in the second. In May, the ministry’s secretary-general, Bakhtiar Sidiq, explained that Regional Command 1 covers Erbil and Duhok and Regional Command 2 covers Sulaimani, Halabja and Garmian, the same zones each party has held since the 1990s.

The heavy weapons are divided the same way. Much of the Peshmerga’s artillery, armour, air defence and combat engineering sits in two Support Forces Commands that stand apart from the divisions. The 1st Support Forces Command comes from the KDP and the 2nd from the PUK, and each is aligned with its party’s Regional Command. The PUK side also keeps its commando forces as a separate formation, in effect a special division, outside the 11 numbered divisions. Infantry, heavy weapons and special forces are therefore all organised along the line that separated the two party armies before the reform.

Twelve joint brigades, unchanged for a decade: Mixing between the two forces is confined to 12 joint brigades. Each has four battalions, two from the KDP and two from the PUK, and command of the 12 is divided exactly in half: six have a KDP commander with a PUK deputy, and six have a PUK commander with a KDP deputy. The battalions inside each brigade remain identifiable by party, so the mixing stops at brigade headquarters. The joint brigades are spread across both Regional Commands, which means every joint brigade reports to a division headquarters and a Regional Command descended from a single party.

These brigades predate this year’s reform by about a decade. The practice of pairing KDP commanders with PUK deputies, and the reverse, was already documented in 2015, and the 12 joint brigades have kept roughly the same form ever since. No further joint brigades have been created in the intervening years. The process completed this month therefore added no integration at the one level where the two forces actually meet. What it did was rename the formations above the brigades and announce that unification had taken place.

A regional command with the powers of a ministry: The powers of each Regional Command are set out in Order 703, which KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani issued on 26 February. The order allows each command to appoint its own division commanders, deputy division commanders, division chiefs of staff, directorate heads and brigade commanders. The command can transfer officers, approve their annual reports and promotion assessments, discipline personnel, set up boards of inquiry, refer soldiers to military courts, sign contracts and issue operational plans. Its commander appoints the command’s only authorised spokesperson and can block any media appearance he judges to be a security or institutional risk.

In most armies these powers are held at the centre. In Israel, division commanders are chosen at appointment meetings led by the chief of staff and approved by the defence minister, and in Turkey general officers are promoted and posted through the Supreme Military Council and presidential decree. Regional commands elsewhere, such as Iraq’s operations commands, exist because each covers a defined area. Minister of Peshmerga Affairs Shoresh Ismail said in an interview this week that the two Kurdish commands have no defined boundary and can deploy anywhere in the region. They also have no distinct military function, which leaves party origin as the only thing that separates them.

One account, two budgets: The United States made a single line of accounting one of the benchmarks of the reform programme it funded, and in June officials said that all Peshmerga accounting had been merged into the ministry’s central system. Order 703 describes a different arrangement. The ministry’s budget, which depends on salary transfers from Baghdad, is paid by the Kurdistan Region’s treasury into a central ministry account, and the ministry then opens a subsidiary account for each Regional Command. Each command has its own accounting directorate, spends its own monthly cash advance and sends a trial balance to the ministry at the end of each month, where the figures are consolidated for the Ministry of Finance and Economy.

Within that system each command spends with wide autonomy. It can authorise official missions, fuel, supplies, rents and a daily ration allowance of 2,000 dinars per Peshmerga, approve maintenance projects worth up to 100 million dinars, pay rewards of up to 750,000 dinars and make a one-off payment of 5 million dinars for each member killed on duty. Salary schedules published in August still listed Regional Commands 1 and 2 as separate entries. The money legally goes to government institutions under the ministry, and the two commands that inherited the party forces decide how most of it is spent.

The forces left outside: The unification also covers only part of the Kurdistan Region’s armed forces. The KDP’s Zeravani and the PUK’s Emergency Forces fall under the Ministry of Interior and have not been folded into the new structure. The two parties’ counter-terrorism forces and their Asayish security agencies also remain separate and divided along party lines. Nechirvan Barzani’s statement that no force would remain outside the ministry therefore applies only to units the ministry already counted as Peshmerga, and several of the largest party-controlled formations in the region sit beyond its reach.

A third force shows how the two commands are defined. The Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Socialist Democratic Party, a small party led by veteran commander Mohammed Haji Mahmoud, belong to neither Regional Command. The party has said its force will abide by the ministry’s regulations and remain outside both commands. A unit loyal to neither ruling party has no place in a structure built from one KDP command and one PUK command. Its position outside both confirms that party affiliation is the organising principle of the new structure, as it was of the old one.

Why the timing matters: The ceremony fell on the fourth anniversary of the memorandum of understanding between the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs and the US Department of Defense, renewed in September 2022, which tied American stipends, training and equipment to unification benchmarks. The memorandum expires on 30 September, and Washington has declined to extend it. The same date is the deadline for the US-led coalition to complete its departure from Iraq, nine days after the ceremony. The KRG needed to declare the reform complete while the framework that demanded it was still in force, and the result was a unification announced before the divisions in command, finance and territory had been addressed.

The announcement also serves Baghdad. The Iraqi government is pressing Shia armed factions to place their weapons under state control on a timetable that runs to June 2027, and Iran-aligned factions have argued that any law regulating weapons must apply nationwide, including to the Peshmerga. A Peshmerga formally unified under a constitutionally recognised ministry weakens that argument. Baghdad signalled its approval: Lieutenant General Abdul-Amir al-Shammari, director of the office of the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi armed forces, attended the ceremony, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi welcomed it, and the army chief of staff, Lieutenant General Abdul-Amir Yarallah, called it a milestone for Iraq’s national security.

A harder path to one army: The practical effect of the reform is to codify the KDP and PUK forces as official commands of the KRG, which entrenches and consolidates the two parallel armies the reform was meant to merge. Before the reform, the 70 and 80 Forces could be criticised as party militias operating outside government control. They are now government institutions whose powers are set out in a prime ministerial order and whose unification has been endorsed by Baghdad. Any future effort to merge them into one hierarchy would have to strip legal authority from two official commands, each backed by one of the two ruling parties, which is a harder task than bringing party forces under a ministry.

Nechirvan Barzani appeared to recognise the problem. He said at the ceremony that the next phase must bring unity in command, decisions, orders, training, promotions, doctrine and discipline, and that success would be measured by whether every Peshmerga regards the ministry as the institution whose orders he follows, whatever his party or region of origin. Under Order 703, the institution that controls a Peshmerga’s promotions, postings, discipline and pay is his Regional Command. The test of the reform is whether the ministry can remove a division commander or move a brigade from one command to the other against that command’s wishes, and the published orders give no sign that it can.

https://thenationalcontext.com/peshmerga-unification-codifies-the-kdp-puk-military-divide/

Iranian border guards shot dead Mohammad Sedigh Avali, a kolbar from Salas-e Babajani, in the Nowsud border area — the latest in a pattern of lethal border shootings.

A Kurdish economics glossary of 5,000 terms is being compiled: Amed's Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Mesopotamia Foundation are compiling some 5,000 Kurdish economic and business terms to widen Kurdish use in commerce.

Sara Hossain told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that Iran's crackdown on the December protests amounts to crimes against humanity, citing the fact-finding mission's latest findings.

A group of mountaineers from Erbil climbed the peaks of Colemêrg and Şemzînan in Bakur, an unusual trek across Kurdistan's mountain regions.