Amnesty International on March 19 condemned the Turkish government's detention of over 100 individuals, including Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, calling it a severe escalation an ongoing crackdown on the political opposition. Amnesty's deputy regional director for Europe, Dinushika Dissanayake, characterized the government's actions as a severe intensification of the ongoing suppression of peaceful dissent, and the targeting of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP). He said:

Syria's interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) chief Mazloum Abdi signed an agreement on March 10 to integrate the Kurdish-led SDF into Syria's state institutions. A statement by the Syrian Presidency said a pact was reached to "integrate all civil and military institutions in northeast Syria [Rojava] under the administration of the Syrian state, including border crossings, the [Qamishli] Airport, and oil and gas fields." The statement emphasized that "the Kurdish community is indigenous to the Syrian state, which ensures this community's right to citizenship and all of its constitutional rights."

In Episode 268 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the continued fighting in Syria since the fall of the Bashar Assad dictatorship in December. The recent outburst of violence in the Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast made headlines, but this week also saw anti-regime protests by Druze in Syria's south. And fighting has never stopped between forces aligned with the new transition government and those of the Kurdish autonomous zone in the northeast. The situation is complicated by continuing military adventures on Syrian territory by foreign powers—Israel, Turkey, Russia and the US. Will Syrians be able to overcome these challenges and forge a democratic and multicultural order, in repudiation of sectarianism, ethno-nationalism and Great Power intrigues?

Up to 70 have been killed in fighting between forces of Syria's transitional government and apparent loyalists of ousted dictator Bashar Assad. The clashes began March 6 when 15 members of the new government's security forces were killed in ambushes near the town of Jableh in the coastal province of Latakia, heartland of the Alawite minority and stronghold of support for the old regime. (Al Jazeera, BBC News) The transition government had been mobilizing troops to the region since two members of the security forcres were killed in a similar ambush in Latakia's Daatur district two days earlier. (AFP)

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Feb. 28 urged that the call by imprisoned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan for an end to the organization's decades-long insurgency against Türkiye must serve as a catalyst to end the systematic misuse of terrorism charges against government critics in the country.

Öcalan founded the PKK in 1978, and the party waged an insurgency against Türkiye for four decades, with approximately 40,000 killed in the conflict. The PKK has been declared a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the US and EU. Öcalan has been imprisoned on the island of Imrali since his capture in February 1999 for violating the controversial Article 125 of Türkiye’s Penal Code. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002. 

Three weeks after US President Donald Trump's order to freeze foreign aid, Syrians are already seeing medical clinics providing urgent assistance close, water distributions slow down, and bread distribution in many displacement camps grind to a halt. After nearly 14 years of war, the UN estimates that 16.5 million people across Syria need some sort of aid. While the December overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad is beginning to change the way aid works in the country, the need for widespread relief for those dealing with severe poverty, food insecurity, and mass internal displacement has been unrelenting.

A group of Palestinian-British individuals has taken initial steps to bring British Petroleum (BP) to court, accusing the company of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The action led by Bimdman's LLP asserts BP's complicity through the continuous supply of crude oil to Israel, facilitated by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, amid ongoing military operations in Gaza since October 2023. The claimants, backed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), aim to hold BP responsible for their suffering and press for the company's immediate cessation of activities they say expedite the conflict.

Amid jubilation following the overthrow of long-ruling dictator Bashar Assad, the only fighting in Syria is now between Arabs and Kurds—as the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) expels the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from the town of Manbij. Ankara's design is clearly to expunge the Kurdish autonomous zone in the northeast region of Rojava. Yet there are also positive signs of an accommodation between the Rojava Kurds and the new revolutionary administration in Damascus. In Episode 256 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the new political landscape in Syria and tries to identify a way forward—past the threat of ethnic war and toward a multicultural democracy.