It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Turkey's parliament passes limited amnesty law for Kurdish PKK militants
Turkey's parliament approved limited amnesty for Kurdish PKK militants on Monday, a key step in a peace process aimed at ending decades of conflict. However, the legislation excludes jailed PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan, whose release the group has made a central demand.
The law is Turkey's first legislative step towards ending the conflict and comes 18 months after Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), urged his followers to disarm.
After 12 hours of debate, lawmakers voted 468 in favour and 88 against, with six abstentions, for the so-called "terror-free Turkey law", which envisages a return to civilian life for some of the PKK fighters who lay down their weapons without granting a total amnesty.
But crucially, the text does not specify what will become of Ocalan, 77, who has spent the past 27 years being held in solitary confinement on Imrali prison island near Istanbul.
Ocalan has played a key role in efforts to end the conflict, issuing a historic call in February 2025 for his fighters to disarm and embrace democratic means to defend the rights of Turkey's Kurdish minority.
Backed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish DEM party, the bill suspends prosecutions and prison sentences for some offences for between five and 10 years.
The move is expected to involve the release of around 3,500 PKK-linked detainees in an initial phase, lawmakers said – around a third of the number held in Turkish prisons.
If those covered by the measure do not reoffend during that period, investigations would be dropped and sentences considered served.
But those involved in serious crimes such as murder would be excluded – with the text making no mention of Ocalan.
Last week, Turkey's vice president Cevdet Yilmaz told CNN Turk Ocalan's case "does not fall within the scope of this law" but said he would be "in a position to contribute to the peace process" without giving further details.
Following the vote, Yilmaz hailed the new law as a "historic step", saying "the 468 'yes' votes are of the utmost importance in terms of political consensus".
"We expect the disarmament and dissolution processes to be implemented as quickly as possible ... and subsequently for the relevant articles of the law to come into effect," he wrote on X.
'Crossing a historic threshold'
Devlet Bahceli, a close Erdogan ally and head of the hardline nationalist MHP whose unexpected olive branch to Ocalan kickstarted the process in October 2024, also hailed the vote.
"May it bring good luck and success," he said, shaking hands with pro-Kurdish MPs from DEM – which also played a key role in the process, with its lawmakers regularly visiting Ocalan on Imrali island to pass messages back and forth.
With the vote, Turkey was "crossing a historic threshold", DEM MP Ceylan Akca told AFP.
"This is the first step of a long walk towards absolute and authentic equality. I choose to be optimistic," she said, admitting the vote had made her "more hopeful."
Ahead of the vote, the government had been keen to stress that the text was not a general amnesty law, aware of the misgivings of the Turkish public which has been scarred by decades of bloody conflict.
And the tension was evident as lawmakers held a heated debate in a session broadcast live on TRT public television.
"How can you negotiate with terrorists? ... You said they would be laying down their weapons unconditionally," said Turhan Comez, a lawmaker with the nationalist opposition Iyi party.
In May last year, the PKK announced it was disbanding following Ocalan's call and two months later, its militants took part in a historic disarmament ceremony in the mountains of northern Iraq where they began symbolically destroying their weapons.
But the PKK leadership has said excluding Ocalan from the legislation would be a red line, warning on Sunday that many of the bill's provisions would remain a "dead letter" if he were not freed.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
Excerpt: How To Close a Camp
Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the racist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons.
Image by Jonathan McIntosh/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.5
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books July 2026.
The Prison-Immigration Knot
By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating by their own economic logics. Even in the face of recessions, the prison industry kept growing. Immigration detention was seen by the Reagan administration as “recession-proof.” For private corporations like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), founded in 1983, immigration detention was a financial lifeline. Federal contracts insulated companies from state budget crises and guaranteed steady revenue streams.
Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the racist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons. Communities hollowed out by deindustrialization welcomed detention centers as employers of last resort. Local politicians who couldn’t secure new factories or union jobs instead competed for prisons and INS contracts. Officials in Port Isabel, Texas, for instance, saw the expansion of what was known as El Corralón, or “the big corral,” as a way to cash in on Reagan’s willingness to lock up asylum seekers.
But if Reagan set the foundation, the Clinton administration built the superstructure. Clinton rode into office pledging to be tough not only on crime but also on immigrants. Governor of Arkansas at the time of the Mariel boatlift, he was furious at the Jimmy Carter administration for detaining migrants at an Arkansas camp. The political backlash had been costly for him, and his resentment carried into his presidency. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill funneled billions into prison construction and policing, while his 1996 immigration laws fundamentally reshaped the landscape of enforcement. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (both of 1996) expanded the categories of deportable offenses, introduced mandatory detention for a wide range of crimes (including minor and decades-old convictions), and sharply curtailed judicial discretion. The antiterrorism law, ostensibly in response to the most home-grown of terror acts (especially the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by white nationalist Timothy McVeigh), in fact focused on purported threats coming from abroad. The law changed the detention of many migrants from discretionary to mandatory, allowing migrants to be detained for up to two years before seeing an immigration judge.
The 1996 laws, the “aggravated felony” category introduced in 1988, and the expansion of INS camps like Krome in Miami and Port Isabel in Texas marked the complete insertion of immigration detention into the American carceral state. Now, the same logic that incarcerated millions of Black Americans under mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws also ensnared migrants—justified by the same political rhetoric of danger, disorder, and deterrence. Both carceral outgrowths served the same economic interests of private prison companies and, purportedly, struggling rural economies. And both entrenched a culture of disposability, where human beings were warehoused in the name of public safety. The expansion of the immigration camp system was rapid and dramatic. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 immigrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, the INS was detaining an average of 19,500 noncitizens daily, with nearly 190,000 detained over the course of that fiscal year. And while the expansion was sold to localities as an economic windfall, the promise was empty. Researchers Amy Glasmeier and Tracey Farrigan compared fifty-five rural counties with prisons constructed between 1985 and 1995 to similar counties without prisons. They found “little evidence of prisons fostering economic growth especially in persistently poor communities.” As the “century of the camp” began to sunset, the prison industrial complex had become a catchall political solution.
The course was set in the 1990s, but, as they did for so much else, the September 11, 2001, attacks marked another key inflection point for immigration camps. In one of the first immigration enforcement moves after the towers fell, INS Acting Deputy Commissioner Peter Michael Becraft implemented a new parole policy targeting Haitian asylum seekers: No Haitian could be paroled out of detention without direct approval from INS headquarters in Washington, even if they had proven their eligibility for asylum. As migrant justice organizer Silky Shah tells me, “Anti-Black racism is the underlying component of the rise of these anti-immi-grant systems.” 9/11 also prompted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its subagency ICE.
Many such senseless, vindictive, and downright racist policies would follow, such as the PATRIOT Act, allowing for indefinite detention, or the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which mandated ICE increase detention capacity by eight thousand per year from 2006 to 2010.
From the inception of his administration in 2000, George W. Bush oversaw a massive expansion of border militarization, including hundreds of miles of border barriers and doubling the number of Border Patrol agents. The vilification, scapegoating, surveillance, and arrests of Muslims, in particular, presaged the open revilement cast on Haitians and other darker-skinned migrants during the Trump administration. At the same time, looking at either the Clinton presidency before Bush or Obama’s presidency after highlights the bipartisan reliance on criminalization of migrants and on the camp. In 2009, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia introduced a clause in the DHS Appropriations Bill that the department “shall maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” In 2012, that “bed quota,” as it became known, was raised to 34,000. The federal government pays out contracts for those beds—via the so-called “guaranteed minimum” clauses—whether they’re filled or not.
On the state level, Arizona, followed by both Georgia and Alabama, led the way in 2010 by trying to make unauthorized migration not only a federal crime but also a state violation. The hypocrisy of crackdown culture continued: All three states passed harsh anti-immigrant laws at the same time they courted ICE contracts to open new detention centers, meaning local jurisdictions increasingly depended on detaining the very people they wanted out.
The experience of detention in Georgia’s Irwin County highlights the local effects of that dependency. What had been a US Marshals facility in the rural county in the early 1990s had shut down. In 2004, a private company reopened the facility to serve as an overflow lockup, detaining people from other counties. With the economy in Irwin struggling—a drought and a lack of migrant agricultural workers were making things worse—in 2007, the county passed a $55 million bond package to expand the prison. They were hoping to attract federal agencies in the detention business and turn the prison into the county’s lifeline. It didn’t quite work. There simply wasn’t enough revenue, and by 2011, after another change in ownership, the facility was nearly a million dollars behind on its taxes. As reported in The Nation, Hazel McCranie, president of the Ocilla-Irwin Chamber of Commerce, told local officials: “You’ve got to go out and get a contract with ICE. That’s your salvation.”
To entice ICE, the joint owners of the prison, with the support of members of Congress and former Senator Johnny Isakson, offered a deal: Instead of spending the typical $60, $90, or sometimes over $160 per day to lock a person up, ICE could cage someone in the Irwin camp for only forty-five dollars a day. ICE soon began transferring people from Alabama’s Etowah jail (where, as we saw in the introduction, Juan was locked up for almost five years) to Irwin.
In January 2011, four people locked inside the Irwin camp went on hunger strike and were sent to solitary confinement as punishment. One detained person held in the Irwin camp, Florent Firmin Kalonji Kalala, told reporters, “We’re fed like dogs.” He added: “I just feel humiliated—that’s the feeling I have every day.”
Years later, the county’s moral and financial compromise deepened. In 2020, reporter José Olivares and I broke a story about Irwin that made international headlines: Besides dangerously lax protocols amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an ICE-contracted doctor who treated patients at Irwin was multiply accused of performing invasive, nonconsensual, and unnecessary gynecological surgeries. We spoke with one woman, Yuridia, who was held in the camp and went to see the doctor after suffering lower abdominal cramps. Without proper explanation, she was soon on the operating table. It wasn’t until she was deported to Mexico that, still suffering the after-effects of the surgery, she learned she had had her uterus removed.
Once exposed, the conditions prompted international outcry, lawsuits, and a Senate investigation, while giving more fuel to people inside and out fighting to shut down the camp. In 2021, ICE announced it was closing the Irwin camp. Then, just as we’ve seen time and again with other camps that aren’t demolished or turned into something new, in 2025 the Trump administration announced its reopening. Steady source of tax revenue, reliable employer, wholesome community partner the camp is not.
Much of the camp infrastructure we see today was established in the Obama years. In 2014, as more families, mostly from Central America, fled violence and poverty and headed toward the United States, the Obama administration—following the encrusted playbook first written in the nineteenth century to try to dispel the Chinese—reverted to using detention as an attempted means of deterrence. First they reoutfitted a law enforcement training site in Artesia, New Mexico; then, they opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to lock up mothers and their children. In 2015 I spent a week in and out of the camp in Dilley—then one of the largest detention camps in the country—frequently referred to as a “baby jail.”
Though school-age kids attended classes inside Dilley and had ready access to milk and apples—adding a thin veneer of humanism to the camp—the atmosphere was starkly punitive. Many of the children I met had colds or coughs. Medical attention was slow and, according to women I interviewed, sick kids were regularly told by medical staff simply to drink water. This was the same tap water that a cook at a local drive-thru taco shop told me not to drink “cuz of the oil”—a reference to the fact that residents in and around Dilley were concerned about fracking wastewater contaminating their groundwater. Many of the kids had trouble sleeping, and women I spoke with reported that their children were depressed and not eating. One told me that her 11-year-old boy had lost more than ten pounds since coming to Dilley. “We are creating a mental health crisis,” one attorney representing the moms and kids, and working to shut the place down, said. “These kids are going to have PTSD and need serious therapy.”
The same year, in 2014, the Obama administration also opened an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana:a camp with an airport, allowing for more efficient deportations. As Nora Ahmed, the director of ACLU Louisiana, explained to me, the facility was “really what allowed Obama to become the deporter-in-chief.” (In the Trump era, the cruel efficiency of the Obama administration’s camp-airport infrastructure has proven incredibly useful.)
Protests, hunger strikes, shutdown campaigns—all of it pushed the Obama administration to issue cosmetic changes and scale back some of the most dehumanizing excesses of the camp system. While Dilley was finally shuttered in 2024, the following year the Trump administration announced it was reopening it. A few months later, a legal complaint detailed how young children held in the Dilley family camp, sometimes for months, did not have reliable access to clean drinking water, soap, or shampoo. The echoes of 2015— nearly identical human rights complaints coming out of the same camp—were clamorous. Parents and their young children reported sleep deprivation due to lights being on 24/7 and a lack of emergency medical attention for kids in acute medical distress. One 11-year-old girl wrote to her attorneys, “Sometimes I see kids who are sad. Most of the kids don’t play because they are afraid.” One nine-year-old boy regressed so severely he could no longer control his bowel movements and had to start using diapers.
Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds—this is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.
And yet there are ways—long established and newly dusted off, storied and hardly recognized—to push back.
It can start with simply questioning the legitimacy of the camps.
A fascinating 1993 Department of Justice report, Resolution of Prison Riots, mentioned Cuban migrants protesting their detention and included a section called “Breakdown of Legitimacy of Imprisoning Criteria,” which notes: “We observe that most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates. They may protest their own conviction or sentence but, at the same time, believe that the other inmates are guilty of crimes, deserve prison sentences, and ought not to be discharged en masse. In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”
In other words, if we recognize the arbitrariness of imprisoning people because of where they are from or where they have moved, we begin to see through the illusion of the camp. We are in such an “uncommon” period now. We can see through the illusion, and we can take that short step toward rebellion against the camp.
John Washington, a reporter at Lookout News, is an investigative journalist and translator based in Tucson. His most recent book, The Case for Open Borders, was published by Haymarket Books in 2024.
This article was originally published by Texas Observer; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
‘They Were Determined to Break Me’: Kurdish Filmmaker Recounts ICE Force-Feeding Horror
“That is just not medical care,” said one expert, “that is torture.” Kurdish filmmaker Gabar Choli, seen here in a screenshot from his YouTube channel, was force-fed for eight months while detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Photo by Gabar Choli/YouTube)
In the latest articles in his series on former hunger-striking asylum-seekers who were force-fed while detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Guardian immigration reporter José Olivares on Monday featured a Kurdish filmmaker who said he is still suffering from physical and psychological pain from the torture he endured last year.
Iran-born Gabar Choli told Olivares that he went voluntarily with guards to the infirmary at ICE’s Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, the first time he was force-fed.
“First I did not resist,” he said. “But after I saw they were torturing me, I started protesting: ‘I’m not coming with you people.’”
From there, things only got worse. Choli said that guards would pin him down while staff shoved a plastic tube through his nose, down his throat and esophagus, and into his stomach to pump him full of nutritional liquid without his consent.
“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head—and they would shove tubes in my nose,” Choli told Olivares. “It’s not easy to be wrestled to the ground twice a day by men that are stronger than you. And you just take it. You have 60cm (2 feet) of tube going through you, and you just feel every centimeter of it.”
“I was respectful. I just told them I am protesting for humane treatment, nothing else,” he said. “But they were determined to break me.”
Choli recounted how one nurse working for ICE “shoved the tube so hard” that “he tore my nose from the inside.”
“They would take me to solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside [my throat],” he said.
The force-feeding continued for the next eight months. One time, a guard’s rough treatment injured his ribs and made breathing painful for weeks. Another time, guards “pressed so hard on my shoulder, I thought my chest was going to break in half.”
During another session, medical staff ignored Choli’s warnings and accidentally shoved the nasogastric feeding tube into his lung.
On some Fridays, Choli agreed to drink the nutritional shakes if guards let him pray and socialize with other detainees.
Court records viewed by Olivares showed Choli suffered injuries and medical issues including swollen sinuses, esophageal damage, and stomach problems following his force-feeding.
Dr. Chanelle Diaz, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s medical center, told The Guardian, “That is just not medical care, that is torture.”
Choli admitted: “It just broke me, mentally broke me. It came to a point that I decided to write my body an apology letter.”
The writer and director of short dramas including Waves Goodbye, Love if Loud, and We Don’t Understand Him, He Speaks in Broken English, Choli advocates for Kurdish independence and legally sought asylum in the United States upon entering the country from Canada in 2022. He lived legally in Los Angeles, attended his required ICE check-ins, and obtained a US work permit while his asylum case was processed.
An immigration judge denied Choli’s asylum claim in 2024, but granted him protection against being deported to Iran, barring the government from sending him back there. He was arrested in February 2025 during a routine ICE check-in following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Choli was first sent to the Desert View Annex in Adelanto, California—run by private prison profiteer GEO Group—where detainees have reported medical and mental health neglect, excessive use of force and pepper spray, mold, punsafe drinking water, inadequate food, poor sanitation, and use of solitary confinement, among other alleged abuses.
The following month, as ICE officials pressured him to agree to be deported to Iran—where his advocacy for Kurdish independence could cost him his life—Choli began his hunger strike, demanding better conditions and a fair resolution to his case.
“I am not suicidal,” Choli declared to a judge. “I am using hunger strike as the only available option to protest the abuse and mistreatment.”
Around two weeks after beginning his hunger strike, Choli was transferred to Port Isabel, where he was held in solitary confinement—which survivors and experts call a form of psychological torture—as he continued his hunger strike.
US District Judge Rolando Olvera—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—ordered Choli’s force-feeding following a request from ICE, which called the detainee’s hunger strike an attempt “to manipulate the immigration system” and “a serious threat to the security and good order” at Port Isabel. Olvera did not meet with Choli, who had no legal representation throughout his ordeal.
The US Department of Homeland Security told The Guardian that ICE “provides involuntary medical treatment only to prevent imminent life-threatening harm or death.”
However, under the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, doctors are advised not to force-feed prisoners who choose to hunger strike and understand the consequences of their actions.
During The Troubles in Northern Ireland, British authorities allowed 10 imprisoned Irish Republican Army members, including former Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, to starve themselves to death.
In contrast, force-feeding is institutional policy in US prisons, including the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp in Cuba, where detainees—most of whom were charged with no crime—were force-fed during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
During Trump’s two terms, hundreds of people have gone on hunger strike at ICE detention centers across the country to protest overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, spoiled and worm-infested food and water, inadequate medical care, delays in immigration procedures, alleged physical and psychological torture, and other mistreatment.
In May, US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed the hunger strikers as a “handful” of detainees whom he falsely claimed were striking because they “want their ethnic right food.”
“This isn’t Holiday Inn,” Mullin said, referring to the hotel chain.
In early January, ICE deported Choli to Canada, where he was reunited with his siblings. He told Olivares that he had to learn to eat again.
“The price of it was my kidneys, my gallbladder,” he said. “My intestines. My being. My bladder, you know, is damaged. Every time I twist and turn, I feel pain. But this is the price you pay for making a stand for what is right.”
How a Family Swimming Spot at a National Forest Became ‘A Trap’ for an ICE Raid
After 13 people were detained at a popular North Carolina swimming spot, advocates worry that the raids will discourage immigrant families from visiting public lands.
Going to Wilson Creek in the Pisgah National Forest is something of a Sunday routine for many Latino families in this corner of the Appalachian Mountains. On a recent Sunday, Argenis Eduardo Torres Rosales joined other parents and children for a day outdoors.
While they swam and picnicked on the rocks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents set up a checkpoint in Caldwell County, North Carolina, on the narrow road that was the only way in and out of the creek. Rosales was sitting in his car when the agents approached him, his aunt said; according to an advocate, they had been stopping people and asking them for their citizenship status.
“Some people that were down at the creek didn’t know what was happening,” said Andreina Malki, defense manager for Siembra NC, a local advocacy organization. “Some people that went back to their cars didn’t come back down.”
By late afternoon, Rosales and 12 others had been detained and separated from their families, including a father whose wife and children were stranded on the side of the road with no signal in the forest because she didn’t have a driver’s license. As far as anyone could remember, this was the first-ever ICE raid in a national forest in North Carolina. It has since become a deterrent to immigrant families who were already underrepresented among visitors to national parks.
Hispanics or Latinos made up only about 8 percent of visitors to national forests, according to the most recent U.S. Forest Service National Visitor report, released in 2022.
Malki grew up hiking and swimming around Pisgah National Forest. “It’s a sacred place to me,” she said. “What they did to families who were probably experiencing that same communion with nature … to have it desecrated by violent and cruel law enforcement activity is heartbreaking.”
Weaponizing the outdoors for immigration enforcement doesn’t only exacerbate a gap in access to the outdoors for people of color. The fear of it becoming a place for more immigration enforcement also prevents families from visiting parks and engaging in nature-based activities, resulting in missed opportunities to explore and learn about the environment, advocates say.
“When families live in terror, environmental justice becomes impossible,” said Kim Bailey, president and CEO of Justice Outside, an environmental organization that promotes the participation of people of color in the outdoors. “Children cannot participate in outdoor programs because families fear leaving home, environmental education becomes inaccessible to communities most impacted by environmental racism, and outdoor spaces transform from healing sanctuaries into surveillance sites.”
The raid came after the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly voted to override Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s veto on SB 153, which requires state law enforcement agencies to collaborate with ICE. Last weekend, community members hosted a prayer vigil in Raleigh to protest the legislation.
In a statement to The 19th, ICE confirmed that the agency worked with the Forest Service to arrest 13 people on July 26. The agency said that “many” of them “had criminal histories including DUI and illegal reentry — a felony.”
“My nephew is no criminal,” said Torres Rosales’ aunt, Wuendy Rosales. She has worked with Siembra NC to independently confirm that her nephew does not have a criminal record. She told The 19th that Rosales, 32, is from Venezuela, entered the United States as an asylum seeker and, as such, received a permit to legally work in the country.
He is being held at an immigration detention facility in Folkston, Georgia – 433 miles from Caldwell County, where his wife and stepson have been waiting for him to come home.
Wuendy Rosales said he has called her from detention every day.
“This is his first time being detained, it’s been a nightmare for him. That’s why I’m speaking up for him, because he can’t speak for himself,” she said.
Between paying attorney fees and depositing funds into his account to afford phone calls home, the family has spent thousands of dollars. That’s on top of Rosales’ already expensive asylum application process, Wuendy Rosales said.
On the first Saturday after the raid, a group of over 100 people gathered for a prayer vigil at a nearby town in Caldwell County. “We gathered here to say unequivocally, the waters and forests belong to everyone,” said Rev. Adam Love from Oak Hill United Methodist Church.
There, questions immersed in confusion and fear swirled around the community: Are forest rangers ICE agents now? Will this happen at other parks?
“It’s creating fear, which is exactly what they want. I think this is a way of them telling folks that they don’t belong in our states, or in our national forests and we think that is not the case,” Malki said, adding that the park appeared to be empty. “We hope that people keep enjoying our natural resources.”
Deputies from the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office were also a part of the raid. Malki and Rosales both said that a partnership between the Forest Service, ICE and local law enforcement felt shocking — and a very intentional way to make people feel less safe.
“They were not looking for someone who had escaped to a national forest or run away,” Malki said. “They were setting up an intentional check point on a Sunday midday to detain and arrest sunbathers and families enjoying the day with their loved ones.”
“We never expected ICE to go there,” Wuendy Rosales told The 19th. The operation, she added, felt like “a trap” because the local enforcement knew the area was frequented by the Latino community.
The community’s relationship with the Forest Service wasn’t always this way. In 2023, the Pisgah National Forest Land Management Plan stated a “desired condition” to serve “historically underserved” communities to increase diversity of visitors, volunteers and partners. In 2024, the Forest Service worked closely with Caldwell County and local partners to create a community action plan for the creek.
“People are scared now to approach a sheriff at the national forest because they were participating in this operation,” Malki said. “If they are aligned with ICE, or doing their job for them, are they a safe agency to approach for other things that are actually forest-related?”
Officers assigned to the Forest Service’s law enforcement division don’t report to local Forest Service units, an agency spokesperson told The 19th.
“While officers have no authority to enforce immigration law, the Forest Service complies with Executive Orders and Administration Policies directing cooperation with agencies tasked with immigration enforcement,” the spokesperson added.
For Wuendy Rosales, the explanation does not make sense. “They’re detaining my nephew, taking his freedom away. For me, it’s a political thing,” she said. “We are paying the price for a political war.”
This article was originally published by The 19th; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
Sunday, August 09, 2026
Kurdish PKK criticises Turkey bill on fate of its fighters
Istanbul (AFP) – Outlawed Kurdish group the PKK on Sunday criticised a proposed Turkish law setting out the fate of its fighters after disarmament, a day before parliament prepares to consider it.
Issued on: 10/08/2026 -
Kurds have regularly demonstrated for the release of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan
And they warned that its provisions would remain a "dead letter" if Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), was not released from jail.
The legislation, part of efforts to end decades of deadly fighting, would allow some PKK members to return to civilian life under certain conditions but falls short of offering a general amnesty.
But Sunday's PKK statement said: "This law contains serious errors and shortcomings. The recommendations... regarding democratisation and the resolution of the Kurdish issue have not been taken into account."
"The fact it refers only to disarmament without using the term 'Kurdish' shows the issue has not been addressed in its entirety," the PKK leadership added.
The statement, carried by ANF news agency, which is close to the group, also called for guarantees that former fighters would be able to take part in political life without facing imprisonment over their political views.
The legislation is due to be debated by Turkey's parliament on Monday. Call for Ocalan's release
Last year the PKK announced plans to disband and disarm, following a call from its jailed founder and longtime leader Ocalan.
But on Sunday, the group warned: "Many provisions of the law will remain a dead letter" unless 77-year-old Ocalan, in jail since 1999, was released from prison.
Ocalan last year called on the PKK to lay down its arms in response to a peace initiative launched by Turkish authorities late 2024, but his fate has not officially been decided.
Backed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish DEM party, the bill would suspend prosecutions and prison sentences for some offences between five and 10 years.
If those covered by the measure do not reoffend during that period, investigations would be dropped and sentences considered served.
However, some serious crimes such as intentional homicide would be excluded. Pro-government media have argued that that should apply to Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence.
Earlier Sunday, prominent Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas, jailed since 2016, backed the bill, saying he hoped "another crucial step forward" would be taken in this "historic peace effort".
Demirtas, the former co-chair of Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party, said the law would "radically transform the fate of our country and our region" after more than four decades of armed conflict that has claimed at least 50,000 lives.
14 July revolution in Iraq in 1958 - Photo: Public Domain
The experience of the Communist Ansar[1] in Iraq remains one of the finest and most sincere chapters of communist struggle in modern Iraqi history. Every struggle carries both positive and negative aspects, and no human or political endeavor is free of this, however upright its integrity or noble its aims. Yet this experience, notwithstanding the debate and differing views surrounding some of its aspects, stands as living proof that leftist thought can produce some of the most genuine and inspiring models of struggle even in the harshest and darkest of circumstances. It embodied a remarkable example of sacrifice, self-giving, and determination to pursue the path of freedom and social justice, despite the siege, persecution, and repression it faced at the hands of the fascist Ba’athist regime[2].
The Communist Ansar movement was distinguished by the diversity of its ethnic and religious composition. Its ranks included Arabs, Kurds, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriacs, Turkmen, and Faili Kurds, alongside Armenians. They brought together Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, Mandaean Sabians, Yazidis, and Shabak, with men and women serving side by side. In this, the movement exemplified a living model of fraternity among the components of the Iraqi people. This internationalist character left a lasting impression on the residents of Kurdish villages, who came to understand that their true enemy was the Ba’athist regime and its repressive policies, not Arabs as a people, contrary to the narrative that some hardline nationalist forces on both sides attempted to promote, one that reduced the conflict to a narrow ethnic dimension.
The movement also achieved a notable historic first: communist women fighters, known as the Nasirat, literally “female Ansar,” carried arms for the first time in the history of armed struggle in Kurdistan, taking part alongside their comrades in every battle and duty of the resistance. The presence of women in combat left a profound mark on the consciousness of the Kurdish villages that sheltered the Ansar, helping to entrench a more egalitarian view of women’s role in society and opening a new horizon for the women of those villages to see themselves as active agents in public life, not merely as dependents within it.
Among the most painful chapters of this journey was the Bashtashan massacre[3], carried out by forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan against Ansar of the Iraqi Communist Party on the first of May 1983, claiming the lives of more than one hundred and fifty comrades. This crime remains a deep wound in the memory of the Ansar movement, and its record still calls for further documentation and accountability, in fairness to the memory of the victims.
In 1988, the Communist Ansar witnessed firsthand one of the most horrific acts of genocide in modern history: the Anfal campaign[4], waged by the Ba’athist regime against the Kurdish people. It claimed the lives of more than one hundred and eighty thousand people, destroyed thousands of villages, and involved the use of internationally banned chemical weapons.
Amid those brutal conditions, the Communist Ansar played a notable role in defending Kurdish villages and standing by their people in their ordeal, earning the trust and respect of the Kurdish population and leaving a lasting mark that remains present in the collective memory of that period. This armed presence was not confined to the Communist Ansar alone; other leftist factions, such as the Communist Current organization, also maintained a limited armed presence, which later took part in the March 1991 uprising that followed the Second Gulf War.
Before the Communist Ansar experience took the shape we came to know, the history of the Iraqi left had already seen an earlier attempt at armed struggle. It was led by the martyr Khalid Ahmad Zaki[5] in the southern marshes in 1968, drawing on the Guevarist model and the ideas of armed revolution he had absorbed through his internationalist connections. Khalid Ahmad Zaki fell alongside his comrades in the battle of Hor al-Ghomouka, yet his experience remained etched in Iraqi leftist memory, later inspiring literary and artistic works that documented that rare moment in the history of the Iraqi left.
Although I hold reservations today about armed struggle as a method of resistance, the conditions of that period, under the ferocious onslaught the fascist Ba’athist regime unleashed on leftists and other progressive forces, left, in my assessment, no option but to take up arms, if only in self-defense against repression and liquidation, and to help bring down the dictatorship of the time.
I turn here to my own personal experience with this movement. I am honored to have been among those who took part in it through my activity within the underground organizations of the Iraqi Communist Party[6] inside Iraq between 1983 and 1990, as a member of the March 31 Organization[7], one of the party’s largest clandestine organizations, in which I had the honor of taking part in its leadership. It brought together dozens of comrades from across Iraq.
The organization was initially linked to the Ansar movement through the Independent Fifth Battalion, and at times through the Third Battalion or directly with the Badinan sector[8]. We were, to a great extent, the “Ansar of the interior,” providing the Ansar movement with continuous support through intelligence and information on the movements of military and security forces, securing weapons, equipment, medicine, and documents, facilitating movement within the cities, and helping smuggle endangered comrades out to liberated areas, in addition to agitation and political and organizational work inside the cities. We also made continuous secret visits to Ansar military bases to meet with comrades overseeing party organizations.
Whatever our position today on this or that chapter of the Communist Ansar’s journey, and whatever our agreement or disagreement over the merits of armed struggle as a method of resistance, this experience will remain one of the significant chapters in the history of worldwide socialist struggle, alongside other experiences that walked the same path in different contexts.
These range from the Sierra Maestra rebels in Cuba, who overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959, to the Sandinista Front in Nicaragua, which brought down the Somoza family’s rule in 1979; from the Greek People’s Liberation Army, which resisted Nazi occupation before waging a bitter civil war against a Western-backed right, to the Dhofar rebels in Oman, who waged, between 1965 and 1976, one of the longest armed leftist revolutions in the Arabian Peninsula in defense of social justice and against British colonial presence; and on to the leftist resistance movements across Europe during the Second World War, from the French and Italian resistance to Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, where communists and leftists formed the backbone of the armed struggle against Nazi occupation and fascism.
These experiences vary in their circumstances and outcomes, and each carries important lessons worth drawing on as well as mistakes that deserve frank, comradely critique. Yet they all share a common truth: that the left, when confronted with brutal repression and the closing off of any open political horizon, has proven capable of producing extraordinary forms of resistance that remain part of humanity’s shared memory in its struggle for freedom, social justice, and the socialist alternative.
In closing, the spirit of sacrifice and dedication embodied by the Communist Ansar experience, and by other chapters of leftist struggle in Iraq[9], ought to be channeled into a unified energy placed at the service of working women and men alike, of hand and of mind. I renew my call for the necessity of uniting leftist and progressive forces, across their various factions and currents, and for strengthening joint action among them.
Glory and eternal memory to the martyrs of the Iraqi and Kurdistani leftist movement in all its factions, foremost among them the martyrs, women and men, of the Communist Ansar. The left, in all its factions, will remain the shining human hope in the face of the corruption and authoritarianism prevailing in Iraq, both sustained by the notorious system of ethnic and sectarian power-sharing.
This text was written on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the founding of Al-Nasir Al-Shuyu’i newspaper (literally, “The Communist partisan”)[10], to which I wish continued success in documenting this legacy of struggle and passing it on to new generations.
Explanatory Notes
[1] The Communist Ansar (Partisans) movement: A militant and armed formation founded by the Iraqi Communist Party in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan starting in the late 1970s, to confront Ba’athist repression through armed struggle after overt political activity had become impossible inside the cities. It brought together thousands of militants, women and men, who were forced to leave their cities for the liberated mountain areas.
[2] The Ba’athist regime: The regime that ruled Iraq under the leadership of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party between 1968 and 2003, under which repression against leftists, communists, and the political opposition reached its peak, particularly under Saddam Hussein. Despite its repressive character toward communists and the opposition at home, the regime received simultaneous backing from both blocs of the Cold War. The Soviet Union supplied most of its military hardware in the 1970s under the 1972 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and continued arming it throughout the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, while Western capitalist states, most notably France and West Germany, provided advanced weapons and technology, some of which was later used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons, alongside indirect American economic and intelligence support during that same war.
[3] The Bashtashan massacre: An armed attack carried out by forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, under the leadership of Jalal Talabani and Nawshirwan Mustafa, on the first of May 1983, with backing from the Ba’athist regime, against bases of the Iraqi Communist Party in the mountain village of Bashtashan near the Qandil mountain range. It resulted in the killing of more than one hundred and fifty party members and Ansar fighters, making it one of the bloodiest and most criminal episodes in the history of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq.
[4] The Anfal campaign: A series of military operations carried out by the Ba’athist regime under Saddam Hussein between February and September 1988 against the Kurdish people in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It comprised eight phases in which chemical weapons were used, resulting in the killing or disappearance of nearly one hundred and eighty thousand people, the destruction of thousands of villages, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of residents. It was later recognized by a number of judicial bodies as an act of genocide against the Kurds.
[5] Khalid Ahmad Zaki: An Iraqi communist militant, born in Baghdad in 1935, who left his post as secretary of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London to lead an armed struggle experiment inspired by the Guevarist model in the marshes of southern Iraq in 1968. He fell in battle alongside a number of his comrades at Hor al-Ghomouka in June of that same year, and later became known by the epithet “Iraq’s Guevara.” His story inspired the novel A Banquet for Seaweed by the novelist Haidar Haidar.
[6] The Iraqi Communist Party: Founded in 1934, it is one of the oldest communist parties in the Middle East and played a central role in Iraqi political and labor life throughout the twentieth century. It was subjected to repeated waves of repression under successive regimes.
[7] The March 31 Organization: One of the largest underground organizations of the Iraqi Communist Party operating inside Iraqi cities during the 1980s. It worked under extremely difficult clandestine conditions amid relentless surveillance by the Ba’athist security apparatus.
[8] The Badinan sector: A geographic area in the Kurdistan region of Iraq that served as one of the most important theaters of activity for the armed Communist Ansar movement. The Independent Fifth Company and the First and Second Battalions of the Communist Ansar were active in this sector.
[9] Iraqi leftist parties: Alongside the Iraqi Communist Party, the Iraqi leftist landscape includes other organizations, among them the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Iraqi Communist Party (Central Command), the Iraqi and Kurdistan Worker-Communist Party, the Communist Alternative Organization, the Communist Left Party, and others. These organizations differ in their history and ideological orientations, but all share a common belonging to Iraq’s leftist and communist field.
[10] Al-Nasir Al-Shuyu’i newspaper (literally, “The Communist Partisan”): A periodical published by the League of Iraqi Communist Ansar. Its inaugural issue (Issue Zero) appeared in July 2021, with the aim of documenting the history of the Communist Ansar movement and passing on its legacy of struggle to new generations, particularly the youth of the 2019 Tishreen uprising. It includes testimonies, articles, and archival material written by the Ansar themselves about their experience both in the mountains and in the cities.Email
