Amidst the Medieval Darkness of ISIS, the Kurds Stand for Secularism and Democracy in the Middle East

Last week saw the death of Yaşar Kemal, an ethnic Kurd who is regarded as one of Turkey's greatest novelists. The very same day, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), a left-wing Turkish political party focused on Kurdish affairs, gave a joint press conference with the government, urging the armed insurgency known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to lay down its arms.
This call for peace may herald the end of the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, a conflict that began in 1984 and effectively became a civil war during the 1990s. Founded as a Marxist-Leninist organization by Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, the PKK championed the political and cultural rights of the Kurds. It also sought to end the dominance of the ağas (tribal landlords) and şeyhs (religious leaders) in Turkey's Kurdish regions, much like the struggle faced by the hero of Kemal's famous 1955 novel, Memed, My Hawk.
Indeed, Kemal's literary oeuvre, extolling human dignity in its fight against injustice and tyranny, has long been a source of inspiration for the Kurdish movement in Turkey. Kemal's novels suggest that this struggle will only succeed through wide-scale participation by the poorer classes of society. Accordingly, the Kurdish movement has attempted to steadily broaden its base of support over the past 30 years by publicizing its demands to the Kurdish masses.
Kemal devoted his own life to the cause of peace, making frequent appeals in his later years to end the ongoing violence. Recently, Turkey has begun to see the fruits of his labors.
In March of 2013, Öcalan (who has been imprisoned on Turkey's İmralı Island for over a decade) proclaimed a cease-fire between the PKK and the Turkish state, offering hope of a solution to this 30-year-old conflict, in which a staggering 40,000-plus people have died.
By comparison, less than 1,000 lost their lives in the rebel group ETA's 40-year conflict in Spain, while 1,800 died in nearly three decades of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/behlal-azkan/isis-kurds-democracy_b_6817244.html?utm_hp_ref=world

To me the Kurds should have a right to their own home. Having a secularist Muslim democratic nation would have huge ramifications for the region no doubt bringing about change.

Read the title, what a dickhead:

Nearly all Iraqi Kurds consider themselves Sunni Muslims. In our survey, 98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias. (A small minority of Iraqi Kurds, including Yazidis, are not Muslims.) But being a Kurd does not necessarily mean alignment with a particular religious sect.

risingsun wrote:Read the title, what a dickhead:

Nearly all Iraqi Kurds consider themselves Sunni Muslims. In our survey, 98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias. (A small minority of Iraqi Kurds, including Yazidis, are not Muslims.) But being a Kurd does not necessarily mean alignment with a particular religious sect.

Eh?
You can still believe in secularism if religious as the vast majority of religious people do in the west.
So yes read the title, it seems lost on some people

Clearly sassy backs theocracies over democracy.
How telling indeed.

ISIS has now retreated from Kobani, and the PYD controls a region in northern Syria the size of New Jersey, a region known as Rojava. There, in accordance with Öcalan's doctrine of "democratic autonomy," Arabs, Assyrians and Kurds share power, and all uphold the ideal of a modern secular society. By contrast, just a few hours south, in ISIS's de facto capital of Raqqa, women are forced to wear burqas, and beheadings are carried out in public. Last month, French President François Hollande held a top-level meeting with PYD leaders. In short, the PKK is trying to shed its image as a "terrorist" organization in the eyes of the West and enter into a partnership with the U.S. and the EU. It has nothing to gain from a renewed declaration of war upon Turkey, a NATO country.

Brasidas wrote:

risingsun wrote:Read the title, what a dickhead:

Nearly all Iraqi Kurds consider themselves Sunni Muslims. In our survey, 98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias. (A small minority of Iraqi Kurds, including Yazidis, are not Muslims.) But being a Kurd does not necessarily mean alignment with a particular religious sect.

Eh?
You can still believe in secularism if religious as the vast majority of religious people do in the west.
So yes read the title, it seems lost on some people

Brasadis is right

Secularism is independent of Religion with exception of fundamentalist.