Above and Below the Line

A photo taken by Kurdish photojournalist Refik Tekin in January of this year shows civilians on the border wall between Nisêbîn and Qamişlo. Parts of the barbed wire have been torn down. The people are standing on top of the wall and facing from Turkish state territory towards the Syrian one, from Northern Kurdistan to Western Kurdistan, from Bakur to Rojava, from serxet to binxet—literally “above” and “below the line”. The image was taken in the context of transnational protests against attacks by government militias on self-administered Kurdish territories in Syria.

What began with the attacks of Syrian militias on Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo on January 6, 2026 spread across large parts of Rojava in the weeks that followed. The Islamist HTS militias under al-Sharaa targeted infrastructure and humanitarian supplies: in Kobanê, power and water supplies were cut off and around 150,000 people had to flee. Official Syrian decrees cited the Surah Al-Anfal of the Qur’an, which inevitably reminded Kurds of the genocidal Anfal campaign led by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s.

This year, a further escalation of violence could be prevented only with the integration agreement of January 30, which was formulated between the Syrian transitional government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) under mediation by the US and France. The agreement declared the partial integration of Kurdish forces and administrative structures into the Syrian central state. It emerged under extreme pressure, leaving the question of how federal self-administration, autonomous women’s structures and the achievements of the last decade are to be secured unanswered. Most of all, it leaves behind a crisis of trust—in state structures which historically did not protect Kurds, and in borders which never represented their historical living spaces, but separated them instead.

Kurdistan Beyond Borders

Refik Tekin’s photograph of the protests in solidarity with Rojava shows that for the people, the border fence between Turkey and Syria is not a functional line of division, but an arbitrary separation of continuous social, historical and geographic connectedness. The current Syrian-Turkish state border primarily follows the railway route Berlin–Baghdad and became the political demarcation between Turkey and French-mandated Syrian territory following the Ankara agreement of October 20, 1921.

After the end of the Ottoman empire, the Kurdish territory was separated between the Turkish national state and French and British colonial mandate powers under the Treaty of Lausanne, creating four regions located in what are today the nation states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Kurds became not only a stateless people surrounded by several states, but also minorities within these states.

For their inhabitants, the four parts of Kurdistan carry the names of Bakur, Rojava, Başûr and Rojhilat—North, West, South, East—where the point of reference for these directions are not the states in which they find themselves, but Kurdistan itself. These terms resist state description and position Kurdistan not as a periphery of new centres, but as its own central point of reference. From this perspective, the existing state borders become merely a descriptor of being above or below the line.

“Life” In The Frame of Politics

During my research on Kurdish transnational mobilisation conducted between 2018 to 2023, I interviewed activists from different parts of Kurdistan and the diaspora. I wanted to understand how the Kurdish liberation movement has managed to survive and reproduce itself in new contexts and conflicts despite multiple and multi-state episodes of violence. The field of research examining protest and violence in Kurdistan cannot be easily confined to a form of regional or territorial scholarship; it stretches across borders, migrations, diasporic contexts and Turkish prisons. Interviews were therefore also held with the incarcerated, such as the feminist activist and Kurdish politician Sebahat Tuncel.

In October 2020, at the time of the interview, Tuncel had already been incarcerated for four years. She responded to my questions with handwritten notes, including these words:

“Every political movement organises its own ideological political approach, their life, within the framework of its politics. It makes no difference whether on the inside or the outside. People live and act the way they think. The praxis of a person is an expression of their intellectual, mental orientation.”