Within days of Jina Masha Amini’s death in Iran at the hands of the Iranian morality police, protests erupted in Iran and across the world. As we saw in those protests, activists in Iran and across the globe understood the protests along nationalist and ethno-nationalist lines. Yet, with the discussion of the protests, there was a particular silence, a particular absence, and particular histories that were not named. Kurdish lives, Kurdish histories, and Kurdish death were subsumed under the language of feminism. Yet, these practices of feminism, especially a global feminism, as scholar Mimi Nguyen reminds us,[i] works with nation-states, works with imperial and colonial powers, and refuses to engage with a wide assortment of voices on the ground. Jina Masha Amini’s Kurdish heritage was intentionally silenced and refused, thereby forgetting entire segments of violence against Kurdish women in particular and Kurds in general.
These silences in 2022 Iran are part of a longer history of silence that is also simultaneously a refusal of Kurdish sovereignty alongside state-sponsored attacks to eliminate Kurds across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In 2017, a referendum for Kurdish nationhood in the Kurdish Region of Iraq was denied by nations across the globe. Thus, with the history and the contemporary moment as times of silence and violence, we must investigate the times when Kurds are not mentioned, where there is another silence. In 2026, these silences continue to haunt, but without a realization in non-Kurdish quarters of this haunting, this ghostly presence of genocidal politics.
The media attention to the current context of Syria has been minimal to none. When there has been media coverage, it has been the coverage of the fall of the Assad regime and the emergence of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa as the leader of the revolution and the new President of Syria.In fact, we subsequently have seen meetings between President al-Sharaa and US President Trump. Yet, while this coverage of news in Syria, though minimal, is important, the coverage of President al-Sharaa comes to stand in for Syria. With this standing in, there is an entire set of foreclosures, erasures, and silences.
Yet, these silences are not accepted by Kurds in Kurdistan or by Kurds in the diaspora. During my ethnographic research that began with Kurdish American communities in 2011 and ran until 2024, I saw the many ways that Kurdish Americans highlighted the conditions Kurds were living in across Kurdistan. Kurdish Americans refused these enforced silences.With the little mainstream institutional focus on Kurdish issues in US media, Kurdish Americans turned to Facebook (with its own policing apparatuses) to make visible and address the events unfolding across parts of Kurdistan. In 2014, Kurdish Americans from across the US shared vital news about the ISIS onslaught against Kurds, Yezidis, and other minorities in Syria and Iraq, such as in cities like Kobane. Through this digital venue, they were able to vocalize the dire conditions and showcase a more complex portrait of Kurdish communities in Syria and Iraq. In the process, they used Facebook to create informational networks and infrastructures of support for Kurds in Kurdistan.
These vital forms of communication and news sharing eventually intersected with Western media. Not long after the ISIS talks and the rounds of silence, the Western media was infatuated with the Kurdish woman fighter, which is also part of the Western Orientalism gaze and desire for the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. The Kurdish woman fighter, especially the YPJ units in Rojava/Western Kurdistan/North Syria and the Kurdish guerilla fighters in Turkey, was represented in opposition to the Orientalist imagination of SWANA women as powerless dupes and victims to Muslim patriarchy.
While that Western white gaze and infatuation with the Kurdish woman fighter remained within the global mediascapes for a little while, there were still silences around the everyday struggles and everyday experiences of Kurds. Now, in 2026, the silence in our Western coverage of Syria is deeply connected to the anti-Kurdish violence and genocidal campaigns surfacing in Kobane and other parts of Rojava. Rojava is on fire! A fire that continues to engulf a wide spectrum of Kurdish communities, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities. The fire spreads and burns Kurdish bodies, in ways reminiscent of the ISIS attacks on Kobane in 2014 and Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare that killed thousands of Kurds in Halabja, Iraq. Hospitals, schools, homes, and vital structures are being destroyed in Kurdish areas, which resembles the Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza. Yet, there is a silence, while Kurdish communities across the globe are mobilizing to demand peace and provide support.
Silence is the handmaiden of murder and death. The fires are burning, but where are the global activists and feminist allies? Why are they absent and silent? These silences regarding the death of Kurds and the violence towards Kurdish point to the ways that activism against power and in the service of justice has never quite been that. It has been window dressing without material change.
President Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa’s military campaign in Rojava at this moment is nothing short of genocidal violence. Yet, our mainstream US media outlets are not covering the situation. While US President Trump is bombing and blackmailing Venezuela, setting up warships to possibly bomb Iran, and courting Syrian President al-Sharaa with oil and capitalism in mind, our media outlets refrain from covering precarious, vulnerable stateless communities. On the other hand, Kurdish Americans, regardless of whether their families are from Syria, Iran, Turkey, or Iraq, have taken to Facebook to organize, to collect donations, provide material support for Rojava Kurds, and call on political powers to intervene.
Our silence in the US reflects Western disregard for Kurdish lives. While Kurds at times are hailed as the “good Muslim” in the SWANA region in opposition to other “bad Muslims,” (Mamdani 2002; Alsultany 2013), the very lives of Kurds do not seem to matter in the West unless there are things to be extracted. Just the bare lives of Kurds have no value, and we must not sit in this silence and further devalue Kurdish lives. It is crucial now to address the situation in Syria, support Kurdish, Yezidi, Alawite, and other minority communities, and demand peace in Rojava now. Our colleagues, friends, and comrades at the universities in Rojava have asked that our global citizens do the following to support minority communities in the region and bring about peace. Here is the list of some of the main things they listed in a released statement:
- Contact your organizations, institutions and political representatives and demand action to stop the genocide and end the siege;
- Organize teach-ins, panels, and events to inform the public;
- Donate to Heyva Sor a Kurdistanê and Medico International for direct humanitarian assistance;
- Speak publicly in defense of the self-determination rights of the Kurds and other minoritized groups in the region;
- Reject the normalization of the former al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) rule and demand accountability for past and ongoing human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law.
Peace is the answer to violence, and peace cannot be silent. Silence is a disruption of peace. Please act for peace and demand the end to the Syrian government’s breaches of human rights and law. Let us shout, let us demand, let us work for Kurdish life and Kurdish sovereignty in service of peace.
[i] Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “The biopower of beauty: Humanitarian imperialisms and global feminisms in an age of terror.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 2 (2011): 359-383.
Stanley Thangaraj is a socio-cultural Anthropologist. His interests are at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. He studies immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S. South to understand how they manage the black-white racial logic through gender and the kinds of horizontal processes of race-making. His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-ethnic-only South Asian American sporting cultures. His newest research is on Kurdish America, which received the 2015 American Studies Association “Comparative Ethnic Studies” award and Association for Asian American Studies Social Caucus Faculty Article award.