cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/42128581

from Cuba Analysis Podcasts

Thousands of Cubans rose early this morning to honor the 32 compatriots killed by U.S. troops during the violent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. Their remains were flown into Havana, and honoured with a ceremony there before being carried along Boyeros Avenue—lined with mourners—to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. People waited for hours to pay tribute to the fallen Cubans, despite the heavy rain which swept in, filing past the coffins in silence and sorrow.

Cuba Analysis co-host Helen Yaffe was there as the procession passed and spoke with attendees about why they had participated and what this moment means for them and for Cuba.

Peter Link

2026-01-24 03:42:04

Video - Thousands Gather in Havana to Honor 32 Cubans Killed During U.S. Invasion in Venezuela

from Cuba Analysis Podcasts

Thousands of Cubans rose early this morning to honor the 32 compatriots killed by U.S. troops during the violent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. Their remains were flown into Havana, and honoured with a ceremony there before being carried along Boyeros Avenue—lined with mourners—to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. People waited for hours to pay tribute to the fallen Cubans, despite the heavy rain which swept in, filing past the coffins in silence and sorrow.

Cuba Analysis co-host Helen Yaffe was there as the procession passed and spoke with attendees about why they had participated and what this moment means for them and for Cuba.

Thousands Gather in Havana to Honor 32 Cubans Killed During U.S. Invasion in Venezuela

Thousands of Cubans rose early this morning to honor the 32 compatriots killed by U.S. troops during the violent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. Their remains w...

^PeerTube.wtf

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet (despite its hyperbole) suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands.

The deal formalized what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favored, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicization in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a “highly dangerous development” since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organized our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralized. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarize Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism.” This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilization by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were, in her words, ”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force,” said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution,” said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralization and armed self-defense could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp,” said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2143…

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet (despite its hyperbole) suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands.

The deal formalized what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favored, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicization in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a “highly dangerous development” since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organized our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralized. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarize Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism.” This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilization by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were, in her words, ”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force,” said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution,” said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralization and armed self-defense could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp,” said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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2026-01-20 22:46:48

The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet (despite its hyperbole) suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands.

The deal formalized what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favored, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicization in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a “highly dangerous development” since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organized our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralized. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarize Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism.” This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilization by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were, in her words, ”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force,” said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution,” said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralization and armed self-defense could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp,” said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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Full text: PKK’s statement on disbanding decision

^Bianet

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7404870

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2143…

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet (despite its hyperbole) suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands.

The deal formalized what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favored, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicization in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a “highly dangerous development” since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organized our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralized. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarize Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism.” This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilization by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were, in her words, ”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force,” said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution,” said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralization and armed self-defense could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp,” said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

---

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thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2026-01-21 01:37:15

The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion : Peoples Dispatch

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2143…

The agreement that terminated the Syrian Kurdish enclave was presented by its signatories as a pragmatic settlement. But, in fact, the deal is a major political defeat for the Syrian Kurdish political formations. Certainly, the rapid advance of the Syrian armed groups loyal to President Ahmad al-Sharaa broke the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish group, but this advance can only be understood by the total backing given by the United States to the Syrian government against the SDF. The SDF was outgunned and had no air support, which is what they had benefitted from in their war against the Islamic State. The SDF’s Mazlum Abdi signed the effective surrender on behalf of his party and their army. US Ambassador Tom Barrack’s tweet (despite its hyperbole) suggested the end of the Syrian Kurdish experiment called Rojava (the Kurdish word for where the sun sets, or the western part of the Kurdish lands.

The deal formalized what months of military pressure had already made clear. Syrian state institutions returned to the northeast not as partners but as authorities keen on a strong central state loyal to al-Sharaa. Over the course of the past year, border crossings that had been in the hands of various groups returned to central government control and oil revenues began to be collected for Damascus. The Syrian Democratic Forces, one of the last remaining independent military challenges to al-Sharaa after the rout of the Syrian Arab Army, agreed to be subordinated to the military’s central command but did not want its units dismantled; in other words, the SDF wanted to retain its own structures within the Syrian armed forces. This was the agreement that Abdi and others in the Kurdish leadership, such as Ilham Ahmed (former co-chair of the SDF), favored, but they were outflanked by sections of the Syrian Kurdish leadership that did not want to lose the autonomy of the Kurdish enclave. But now Kurdish political offices have begun to close, flags are being removed, and the language of autonomy has been erased from official documents.

Al-Sharaa came to the presidency of Syria through his politicization in al-Qaeda’s Syrian fronts. While he has left behind his turban for a suit, there are indications that his own followers are comfortable with the ideology of and links with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and that they welcome an alliance with both the United States and Israel. In the days leading up to this ceasefire and deal, SDF officials reported that the Syrian armed forces focused their attention on the prisons that held Islamic State fighters who had been captured by the SDF; heavy fighting had indeed been reported near Shaddadi prison (Hasaka) and al-Aqtan prison (Raqqa). These attacks, the SDF said, were a “highly dangerous development” since they suggested that the government forces wanted to free the Islamic State fighters from the prisons and put them back on the battlefield against groups such as the SDF. Now the state has control over these prisons and could do what it wants with these prisoners.

The dawn of Rojava

In 2012, the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew its military from the northeast so that it could defend the southwest from a cycle of rebellions. This withdrawal provided an opportunity for the Syrian Kurds, who had been fighting for either an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within Syria for decades. The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim told me in 2013 that the Kurdish political and military forces filled a vacuum. “We organized our society so that chaos would not prevail.” The PYD’s Muslim made three points: Syria must remain united, Syria must belong to all those who live in it, and Syria must be decentralized. The government in Damascus accepted these three points and a tacit understanding was reached between the Syrian Kurdish political forces, other minorities in Syria, and al-Assad’s government. This was the opportunity that allowed for the birth of Rojava.

Over the decade since 2012, the Rojava enclave came under serious attack by the Islamic State (in 2014-15) and the Turkish armed forces (2018) as well as sustained attacks by various smaller groups. In this decade, the army of the SDF, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the Kurdish Peshmerga (from Iraq), and the armed forces of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK from Turkey) defended this enclave, most dramatically from the advance of the Islamic State. When the Islamic State took Sinjar and began to ethnically cleanse the area of Yazidis in August 2014, it was the YPG and its allies that began a long siege of the area that was only won by them in November 2015 at a great cost. US air support began to assist the YPG and the SDF in their quest to defeat the Islamic State and to exist as an independent enclave from Damascus. Neither Salih Muslim nor other leaders of the Syrian Kurdish groups pinned their faith wholeheartedly on the United States, although the balance of forces set in motion an alliance that was always going to lead to betrayal.

Statements from Salih Muslim and Mazlum Abdi that silence about the Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 would “cost Syria its unity” or that the YPG was the only “barrier against Turkish occupation” did not count for much. Assad was not going to enrage the Turkish government at this time (in fact, it was in this period that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signed a deal to demilitarize Idlib and allow the al-Qaeda inheritors, including al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham or HTS to build their strength in peace and wait a turn of fortunes). Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.

Turkey’s Erdoğan refused to see the Syrian Kurdish rebellion as anything other than an extension of the fight of the Turkish PKK. In 2020, he told his party cadre at a meeting, “Turkey will never allow the establishment of a terror state right beside its borders. We will do whatever is necessary and drain this swamp of terrorism.” This should have been clear to both Assad and the Syrian Kurds that there was going to be no support from Turkey and no end to the attempt at destabilization by Turkey’s NATO partner, the United States. Over the past five years, Erdoğan leaned on the political leadership of the PKK to withdraw its rebellion and to effectively capitulate. In 2025, from his Turkish cell, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan announced “the end of the method of armed struggle”. The Syrian Kurdish project, linked with the PKK, lost its broader strategic depth. Pressure mounted from the Turkish side for the Syrian Kurds to end their project of “armed autonomy”, as Turkish officials said. Turkish military pressure continued with reduced international condemnation or even consideration and diminished Kurdish legitimacy.

The mysterious role of Israel in this entire fiasco has yet to be properly written.

The fall of Assad

With the full weight of Israeli and US air strikes, the forces of Hay’at Tahrir al’Sham led by Ahmad al-Sharaa dashed into Damascus. This victory marked a decisive rupture for the Syrian Kurds. Al-Sharaa, the new president, said that his government would reclaim the northern lands (but he said nothing about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and nothing about the hundreds of square kilometres of the UN buffer zone seized by Israel after al-Sharaa took Damascus). Statements coming from Damascus sent a warning to the Kurds, although the Kurdish leadership hoped against any logic that the United States would protect them (in December 2024, Abdi said that the Syrian Kurds were in ‘continuous communication with our American friends, who support our efforts to stop the escalation and guarantee the rights of all Syrian components, including the rights of the Kurds within the framework of a unified state’). The United States began a withdrawal, and the Syrian Kurds began to voice their hopelessness. One SDF official told me that their forces had fought ISIS and had taken huge casualties but now were, in her words, ”nothing at all”. Syrian forces flooded the north. “Syria does not need experiments imposed by force,” said al-Sharaa. Rojava was in his crosshairs. It did not take long to finish the job. “We are determined to protect the achievements of the revolution,” said Abdi, but this seems more like wishful thinking.

The example of Syria has sent a cold breeze across the border to the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr posted a message on X with a warning that what happened in Syria “should not be taken naïvely”. “The danger is imminent”, he wrote, “and terrorism is supported by global arrogance”. With the change of strategy of the Turkish PKK and the defeat of the Syrian Kurds, any faith in Irbil (Iraq) that the Kurdish autonomous region is eternal will now fade. Al-Sadr suggested unity in the face of external aggression. It is a suggestion that would be hard to reject in these times.

The collapse of Rojava was not merely the failure of a local revolt to be sustained. It was the defeat of a political wager: that decentralization and armed self-defense could rely upon the support of the United States. The language of democracy and dignity might have appealed to an occasional US diplomat, but it meant nothing in Washington. “We built Rojava on a swamp,” said a Syrian Kurdish official to me a few hours after the deal.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The sun sets on the Syrian Kurdish rebellion appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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Full text: PKK’s statement on disbanding decision

^Bianet

New York Times (1/14/26): “Greenlanders are trying to insert themselves into the discussions about their future before it’s too late.”

Kalaallit Nunaat is the name of the country that Donald Trump is salivating over, according to the people who live there. The place that US media call Greenland is an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, with the right to secede by holding a referendum.

In a rare example of treating the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat as real people rather than pieces in a board game, the New York Times (1/14/26) sent two reporters to the island’s capital of Nuuk to ask them what they thought. The Times‘ Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli found next to no interest in becoming part of the United States; sources told them they were well aware of the United States’ record of mistreating its Indigenous residents, and further that they had little interest in trading Danish socialized medicine for America’s profit-based healthcare. “We’re not stupid,” the article summed up the Inuit’s message to Trump.

A similar piece by AP reporter Emma Burrows (reposted by PBS, 1/16/26) found the people of Kalaallit Nunaat similarly rejecting the “business trade” that Trump was reducing their nation to. Opposition lawmaker Juno Berthelsen stressed that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people,” and called for “making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

An article from Al Jazeera (1/18/26) covered not just local opinion, but the island’s political mobilizing against Trump’s demands for annexation: “Thousands March in Greenland Against Trump’s Threats to Take It Over.”

The message reporters get when they actually talk to the nation’s citizens is that Kalaallit Nunaat is not a piece of property to be sold or swapped; it’s a nation of people with the right to self-determination, and they will never become part of the United States, barring the exceedingly unlikely event that they determine that they want to be.

‘Is an off-ramp possible?’

CNN (1/19/26): “Trump has been consistent that the only way to truly reap Greenland’s benefits is to own it outright.”

But the Kalaallit (as the nation’s main Inuit community is called) are so far from the center as to be entirely absent from most US news reporting, which treats Trump’s demand for the island as a conflict between the United States and Europe. Media present Trump’s childish imperial fantasies—he may have been impressed by the distorted size of the island on a Mercator map (Salon, 1/18/26)—as grave matters of global strategy, in pieces like “US Needs Greenland for ‘International Security,’ Says President Trump” (Yahoo, 3/28/25), “Why Trump Wants Greenland—Why the White House Thinks It’s So Important for National Security” (CNBC, 1/7/26), “Energy Secretary Chris Wright Says Trump Wants Greenland for Long-Term National Security” (CBS, 1/20/26) and “The Great Race for the Arctic: Why Russia, China and the US All Have It in Their Sights” (CNN, 1/21/26).

Such pieces treat US annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat as an open question—”Trump Makes Case for US Acquiring Greenland to Davos Leaders,” reported The Hill (1/21/26)—or even a fait accompli, as in the CNN headline (1/19/26): “Even Some Trump Advisers Are Wary of a Military Pursuit of Greenland. Is an Off-Ramp Possible?” Maybe not, is the implication.

As with many pieces written about this Trump-created crisis, that CNN article talks a lot about the United States, Europeans, even the Chinese—but nothing at all about the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2178…

New York Times (1/14/26): “Greenlanders are trying to insert themselves into the discussions about their future before it’s too late.”

Kalaallit Nunaat is the name of the country that Donald Trump is salivating over, according to the people who live there. The place that US media call Greenland is an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, with the right to secede by holding a referendum.

In a rare example of treating the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat as real people rather than pieces in a board game, the New York Times (1/14/26) sent two reporters to the island’s capital of Nuuk to ask them what they thought. The Times‘ Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli found next to no interest in becoming part of the United States; sources told them they were well aware of the United States’ record of mistreating its Indigenous residents, and further that they had little interest in trading Danish socialized medicine for America’s profit-based healthcare. “We’re not stupid,” the article summed up the Inuit’s message to Trump.

A similar piece by AP reporter Emma Burrows (reposted by PBS, 1/16/26) found the people of Kalaallit Nunaat similarly rejecting the “business trade” that Trump was reducing their nation to. Opposition lawmaker Juno Berthelsen stressed that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people,” and called for “making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

An article from Al Jazeera (1/18/26) covered not just local opinion, but the island’s political mobilizing against Trump’s demands for annexation: “Thousands March in Greenland Against Trump’s Threats to Take It Over.”

The message reporters get when they actually talk to the nation’s citizens is that Kalaallit Nunaat is not a piece of property to be sold or swapped; it’s a nation of people with the right to self-determination, and they will never become part of the United States, barring the exceedingly unlikely event that they determine that they want to be.

‘Is an off-ramp possible?’

CNN (1/19/26): “Trump has been consistent that the only way to truly reap Greenland’s benefits is to own it outright.”

But the Kalaallit (as the nation’s main Inuit community is called) are so far from the center as to be entirely absent from most US news reporting, which treats Trump’s demand for the island as a conflict between the United States and Europe. Media present Trump’s childish imperial fantasies—he may have been impressed by the distorted size of the island on a Mercator map (Salon, 1/18/26)—as grave matters of global strategy, in pieces like “US Needs Greenland for ‘International Security,’ Says President Trump” (Yahoo, 3/28/25), “Why Trump Wants Greenland—Why the White House Thinks It’s So Important for National Security” (CNBC, 1/7/26), “Energy Secretary Chris Wright Says Trump Wants Greenland for Long-Term National Security” (CBS, 1/20/26) and “The Great Race for the Arctic: Why Russia, China and the US All Have It in Their Sights” (CNN, 1/21/26).

Such pieces treat US annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat as an open question—”Trump Makes Case for US Acquiring Greenland to Davos Leaders,” reported The Hill (1/21/26)—or even a fait accompli, as in the CNN headline (1/19/26): “Even Some Trump Advisers Are Wary of a Military Pursuit of Greenland. Is an Off-Ramp Possible?” Maybe not, is the implication.

As with many pieces written about this Trump-created crisis, that CNN article talks a lot about the United States, Europeans, even the Chinese—but nothing at all about the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.

---

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

rss

2026-01-22 02:03:09

Recentering the Debate Over ‘Greenland’ Begins With Calling Kalaallit Nunaat by Its Actual Name

New York Times (1/14/26): “Greenlanders are trying to insert themselves into the discussions about their future before it’s too late.”

Kalaallit Nunaat is the name of the country that Donald Trump is salivating over, according to the people who live there. The place that US media call Greenland is an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, with the right to secede by holding a referendum.

In a rare example of treating the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat as real people rather than pieces in a board game, the New York Times (1/14/26) sent two reporters to the island’s capital of Nuuk to ask them what they thought. The Times‘ Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli found next to no interest in becoming part of the United States; sources told them they were well aware of the United States’ record of mistreating its Indigenous residents, and further that they had little interest in trading Danish socialized medicine for America’s profit-based healthcare. “We’re not stupid,” the article summed up the Inuit’s message to Trump.

A similar piece by AP reporter Emma Burrows (reposted by PBS, 1/16/26) found the people of Kalaallit Nunaat similarly rejecting the “business trade” that Trump was reducing their nation to. Opposition lawmaker Juno Berthelsen stressed that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people,” and called for “making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

An article from Al Jazeera (1/18/26) covered not just local opinion, but the island’s political mobilizing against Trump’s demands for annexation: “Thousands March in Greenland Against Trump’s Threats to Take It Over.”

The message reporters get when they actually talk to the nation’s citizens is that Kalaallit Nunaat is not a piece of property to be sold or swapped; it’s a nation of people with the right to self-determination, and they will never become part of the United States, barring the exceedingly unlikely event that they determine that they want to be.

‘Is an off-ramp possible?’

CNN (1/19/26): “Trump has been consistent that the only way to truly reap Greenland’s benefits is to own it outright.”

But the Kalaallit (as the nation’s main Inuit community is called) are so far from the center as to be entirely absent from most US news reporting, which treats Trump’s demand for the island as a conflict between the United States and Europe. Media present Trump’s childish imperial fantasies—he may have been impressed by the distorted size of the island on a Mercator map (Salon, 1/18/26)—as grave matters of global strategy, in pieces like “US Needs Greenland for ‘International Security,’ Says President Trump” (Yahoo, 3/28/25), “Why Trump Wants Greenland—Why the White House Thinks It’s So Important for National Security” (CNBC, 1/7/26), “Energy Secretary Chris Wright Says Trump Wants Greenland for Long-Term National Security” (CBS, 1/20/26) and “The Great Race for the Arctic: Why Russia, China and the US All Have It in Their Sights” (CNN, 1/21/26).

Such pieces treat US annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat as an open question—”Trump Makes Case for US Acquiring Greenland to Davos Leaders,” reported The Hill (1/21/26)—or even a fait accompli, as in the CNN headline (1/19/26): “Even Some Trump Advisers Are Wary of a Military Pursuit of Greenland. Is an Off-Ramp Possible?” Maybe not, is the implication.

As with many pieces written about this Trump-created crisis, that CNN article talks a lot about the United States, Europeans, even the Chinese—but nothing at all about the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.

---

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says Trump wants Greenland for long-term national security

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright spoke with CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O'Keefe about why President Trump wants to acquire Greenland.

^{CBS News}

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7415318

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2178…

New York Times (1/14/26): “Greenlanders are trying to insert themselves into the discussions about their future before it’s too late.”

Kalaallit Nunaat is the name of the country that Donald Trump is salivating over, according to the people who live there. The place that US media call Greenland is an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, with the right to secede by holding a referendum.

In a rare example of treating the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat as real people rather than pieces in a board game, the New York Times (1/14/26) sent two reporters to the island’s capital of Nuuk to ask them what they thought. The Times‘ Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli found next to no interest in becoming part of the United States; sources told them they were well aware of the United States’ record of mistreating its Indigenous residents, and further that they had little interest in trading Danish socialized medicine for America’s profit-based healthcare. “We’re not stupid,” the article summed up the Inuit’s message to Trump.

A similar piece by AP reporter Emma Burrows (reposted by PBS, 1/16/26) found the people of Kalaallit Nunaat similarly rejecting the “business trade” that Trump was reducing their nation to. Opposition lawmaker Juno Berthelsen stressed that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people,” and called for “making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

An article from Al Jazeera (1/18/26) covered not just local opinion, but the island’s political mobilizing against Trump’s demands for annexation: “Thousands March in Greenland Against Trump’s Threats to Take It Over.”

The message reporters get when they actually talk to the nation’s citizens is that Kalaallit Nunaat is not a piece of property to be sold or swapped; it’s a nation of people with the right to self-determination, and they will never become part of the United States, barring the exceedingly unlikely event that they determine that they want to be.

‘Is an off-ramp possible?’

CNN (1/19/26): “Trump has been consistent that the only way to truly reap Greenland’s benefits is to own it outright.”

But the Kalaallit (as the nation’s main Inuit community is called) are so far from the center as to be entirely absent from most US news reporting, which treats Trump’s demand for the island as a conflict between the United States and Europe. Media present Trump’s childish imperial fantasies—he may have been impressed by the distorted size of the island on a Mercator map (Salon, 1/18/26)—as grave matters of global strategy, in pieces like “US Needs Greenland for ‘International Security,’ Says President Trump” (Yahoo, 3/28/25), “Why Trump Wants Greenland—Why the White House Thinks It’s So Important for National Security” (CNBC, 1/7/26), “Energy Secretary Chris Wright Says Trump Wants Greenland for Long-Term National Security” (CBS, 1/20/26) and “The Great Race for the Arctic: Why Russia, China and the US All Have It in Their Sights” (CNN, 1/21/26).

Such pieces treat US annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat as an open question—”Trump Makes Case for US Acquiring Greenland to Davos Leaders,” reported The Hill (1/21/26)—or even a fait accompli, as in the CNN headline (1/19/26): “Even Some Trump Advisers Are Wary of a Military Pursuit of Greenland. Is an Off-Ramp Possible?” Maybe not, is the implication.

As with many pieces written about this Trump-created crisis, that CNN article talks a lot about the United States, Europeans, even the Chinese—but nothing at all about the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.

---

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2026-01-22 02:47:11

Recentering the Debate Over ‘Greenland’ Begins With Calling Kalaallit Nunaat by Its Actual Name

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2178…

New York Times (1/14/26): “Greenlanders are trying to insert themselves into the discussions about their future before it’s too late.”

Kalaallit Nunaat is the name of the country that Donald Trump is salivating over, according to the people who live there. The place that US media call Greenland is an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark, with the right to secede by holding a referendum.

In a rare example of treating the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat as real people rather than pieces in a board game, the New York Times (1/14/26) sent two reporters to the island’s capital of Nuuk to ask them what they thought. The Times‘ Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli found next to no interest in becoming part of the United States; sources told them they were well aware of the United States’ record of mistreating its Indigenous residents, and further that they had little interest in trading Danish socialized medicine for America’s profit-based healthcare. “We’re not stupid,” the article summed up the Inuit’s message to Trump.

A similar piece by AP reporter Emma Burrows (reposted by PBS, 1/16/26) found the people of Kalaallit Nunaat similarly rejecting the “business trade” that Trump was reducing their nation to. Opposition lawmaker Juno Berthelsen stressed that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people,” and called for “making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

An article from Al Jazeera (1/18/26) covered not just local opinion, but the island’s political mobilizing against Trump’s demands for annexation: “Thousands March in Greenland Against Trump’s Threats to Take It Over.”

The message reporters get when they actually talk to the nation’s citizens is that Kalaallit Nunaat is not a piece of property to be sold or swapped; it’s a nation of people with the right to self-determination, and they will never become part of the United States, barring the exceedingly unlikely event that they determine that they want to be.

‘Is an off-ramp possible?’

CNN (1/19/26): “Trump has been consistent that the only way to truly reap Greenland’s benefits is to own it outright.”

But the Kalaallit (as the nation’s main Inuit community is called) are so far from the center as to be entirely absent from most US news reporting, which treats Trump’s demand for the island as a conflict between the United States and Europe. Media present Trump’s childish imperial fantasies—he may have been impressed by the distorted size of the island on a Mercator map (Salon, 1/18/26)—as grave matters of global strategy, in pieces like “US Needs Greenland for ‘International Security,’ Says President Trump” (Yahoo, 3/28/25), “Why Trump Wants Greenland—Why the White House Thinks It’s So Important for National Security” (CNBC, 1/7/26), “Energy Secretary Chris Wright Says Trump Wants Greenland for Long-Term National Security” (CBS, 1/20/26) and “The Great Race for the Arctic: Why Russia, China and the US All Have It in Their Sights” (CNN, 1/21/26).

Such pieces treat US annexation of Kalaallit Nunaat as an open question—”Trump Makes Case for US Acquiring Greenland to Davos Leaders,” reported The Hill (1/21/26)—or even a fait accompli, as in the CNN headline (1/19/26): “Even Some Trump Advisers Are Wary of a Military Pursuit of Greenland. Is an Off-Ramp Possible?” Maybe not, is the implication.

As with many pieces written about this Trump-created crisis, that CNN article talks a lot about the United States, Europeans, even the Chinese—but nothing at all about the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.

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From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says Trump wants Greenland for long-term national security

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright spoke with CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O'Keefe about why President Trump wants to acquire Greenland.

^{CBS News}

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2164…

Last Updated on January 21, 2026 In July 2025, thousands of Bhils gathered in Banswara for the Bhil Tribal Conference. The crowd’s mood was unusually charged. Master Bhanwarlal Parmar, founder of the Adivasi Family Organization, declared that “even after 70 years, the demands of Tribal communities remain unfulfilled,” adding “Tribals are the original inhabitants of India"

The time had come to intensify Bhil’s long-standing demand for an autonomous state: Bhil Pradesh.

The prospective state of Bhil Pradesh would merge 45–49 districts across the four existing Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. Beyond its geographical significance, this movement raises a deeper challenge: it asks whether a modern nation built on democratic ideals can meaningfully recognize the political and territorial aspirations of its Indigenous peoples, rather than merely incorporating them into existing systems of governance.

Over a century after the movement began, Bhil Pradesh has re-emerged as one of India’s most significant geopolitical issues. The Bharat Adivasi Party (BAP), a political party founded in 2023 that advocates for Tribal communities, has put the Indian government against a wall and has the potential to permanently redesign the contours of the world’s largest democracy.

Source

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From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.

rss

2026-01-21 18:49:05

The Bhils’ Long Fight for Recognition Gains New Attention in India

Last Updated on January 21, 2026 In July 2025, thousands of Bhils gathered in Banswara for the Bhil Tribal Conference. The crowd’s mood was unusually charged. Master Bhanwarlal Parmar, founder of the Adivasi Family Organization, declared that “even after 70 years, the demands of Tribal communities remain unfulfilled,” adding “Tribals are the original inhabitants of […]

Source

---

From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.

The Bhils’ Long Fight for Recognition Gains New Attention in India

^{John Ahni Schertow (Intercontinental Cry)}

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7415491

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2164…

Last Updated on January 21, 2026 In July 2025, thousands of Bhils gathered in Banswara for the Bhil Tribal Conference. The crowd’s mood was unusually charged. Master Bhanwarlal Parmar, founder of the Adivasi Family Organization, declared that “even after 70 years, the demands of Tribal communities remain unfulfilled,” adding “Tribals are the original inhabitants of India"

The time had come to intensify Bhil’s long-standing demand for an autonomous state: Bhil Pradesh.

The prospective state of Bhil Pradesh would merge 45–49 districts across the four existing Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. Beyond its geographical significance, this movement raises a deeper challenge: it asks whether a modern nation built on democratic ideals can meaningfully recognize the political and territorial aspirations of its Indigenous peoples, rather than merely incorporating them into existing systems of governance.

Over a century after the movement began, Bhil Pradesh has re-emerged as one of India’s most significant geopolitical issues. The Bharat Adivasi Party (BAP), a political party founded in 2023 that advocates for Tribal communities, has put the Indian government against a wall and has the potential to permanently redesign the contours of the world’s largest democracy.

Source

---

From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2026-01-22 03:28:00

The Bhils’ Long Fight for Recognition Gains New Attention in India

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2164…

Last Updated on January 21, 2026 In July 2025, thousands of Bhils gathered in Banswara for the Bhil Tribal Conference. The crowd’s mood was unusually charged. Master Bhanwarlal Parmar, founder of the Adivasi Family Organization, declared that “even after 70 years, the demands of Tribal communities remain unfulfilled,” adding “Tribals are the original inhabitants of India"

The time had come to intensify Bhil’s long-standing demand for an autonomous state: Bhil Pradesh.

The prospective state of Bhil Pradesh would merge 45–49 districts across the four existing Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. Beyond its geographical significance, this movement raises a deeper challenge: it asks whether a modern nation built on democratic ideals can meaningfully recognize the political and territorial aspirations of its Indigenous peoples, rather than merely incorporating them into existing systems of governance.

Over a century after the movement began, Bhil Pradesh has re-emerged as one of India’s most significant geopolitical issues. The Bharat Adivasi Party (BAP), a political party founded in 2023 that advocates for Tribal communities, has put the Indian government against a wall and has the potential to permanently redesign the contours of the world’s largest democracy.

Source

---

From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.

The Bhils’ Long Fight for Recognition Gains New Attention in India

^{John Ahni Schertow (Intercontinental Cry)}

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7430872

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2187…

Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.

Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.

Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”

An Inuit dog team stands on frozen Baffin Bay near site of crash of a U.S. B52 nuclear bomber on January 21, 1968.
Bettmann via Getty Images

American military survivors of a B52 crash in Greenland smile for a photo in 1968.
Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.

Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.

Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.

Aqqaluk Lynge, left, listens during a 2009 press conference on the Inuit Circumpolar Council on the effects of climate change.
Casper Christoffersen / AFP via Getty Images

Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”

Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”

Read Next

The Miccosukee Tribe blocked Alligator Alcatraz. Then Trump blocked a bill to return their land.

Miacel Spotted Elk

Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”

Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.

“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”

Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.

A banner says “Decolonize Don’t Recolonize,” seen during a demonstration against the Trump administration in Copenhagen in 2025.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

But Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.”

That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.

Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.”

Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so.

“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”

Greenland residents and political leaders have publicly rejected suggestions by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Arctic island could become part of the United States. Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has emphasized that its future will be decided by its own people, with officials stating that the island is not for sale and does not wish to become American.
Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images

After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.

Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament.

Protesters wave Greenland flags during a demonstration with the slogans “hands off Greenland” and “Greenland for Greenlanders” at City Hall Square in Copenhagen, Denmark, on January 17, 2026.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / NurPhoto via Getty Images

In 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.

Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S.

“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.”

To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk.

“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. on Jan 22, 2026.

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From Grist via This RSS Feed.

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2026-01-23 16:10:57

Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that.

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2187…

Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.

Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.

Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”

An Inuit dog team stands on frozen Baffin Bay near site of crash of a U.S. B52 nuclear bomber on January 21, 1968.
Bettmann via Getty Images

American military survivors of a B52 crash in Greenland smile for a photo in 1968.
Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.

Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.

Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.

Aqqaluk Lynge, left, listens during a 2009 press conference on the Inuit Circumpolar Council on the effects of climate change.
Casper Christoffersen / AFP via Getty Images

Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”

Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”

Read Next

The Miccosukee Tribe blocked Alligator Alcatraz. Then Trump blocked a bill to return their land.

Miacel Spotted Elk

Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”

Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.

“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”

Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.

A banner says “Decolonize Don’t Recolonize,” seen during a demonstration against the Trump administration in Copenhagen in 2025.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

But Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.”

That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.

Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.”

Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so.

“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”

Greenland residents and political leaders have publicly rejected suggestions by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Arctic island could become part of the United States. Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has emphasized that its future will be decided by its own people, with officials stating that the island is not for sale and does not wish to become American.
Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images

After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.

Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament.

Protesters wave Greenland flags during a demonstration with the slogans “hands off Greenland” and “Greenland for Greenlanders” at City Hall Square in Copenhagen, Denmark, on January 17, 2026.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / NurPhoto via Getty Images

In 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.

Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S.

“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.”

To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk.

“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. on Jan 22, 2026.

---

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

New opinion poll shows 85% of Greenlanders do not want to join US

Despite Donald Trump claiming the island’s population ‘want to be with us’, Greenlanders overwhelmingly rejected the idea

^{Miranda Bryant (The Guardian)}

The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."

Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.

In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.

The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."

The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.

Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."

The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.

The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.

“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."

The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."

At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."

"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."

That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."

"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."

Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."

"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2202…

The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."

Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.

In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.

The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."

The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.

Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."

The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.

The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.

“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."

The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."

At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."

"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."

That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."

"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."

Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."

"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

rss

2026-01-22 19:01:36

'New Gaza' Plan by Far-Right Zionist Jared Kushner Decried as 'Ethnic Extermination'

The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."

Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.

In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.

The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."

The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.

Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."

The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.

The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.

“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."

The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."

At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."

"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."

That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."

"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."

Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."

"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Updates: 4 Palestinians killed in Gaza as Trump launches ‘Board of Peace’

Board was initially aimed at rebuilding Gaza due to Israeli genocide, but was later pitched as global conflict body.

^{Caolán Magee (Al Jazeera)}

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7424324

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2202…

The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."

Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.

In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.

The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."

The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.

Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."

The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.

The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.

“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."

The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."

At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."

"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."

That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."

"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."

Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."

"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2026-01-22 23:01:54

'New Gaza' Plan by Far-Right Zionist Jared Kushner Decried as 'Ethnic Extermination'

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/2202…

The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."

Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.

In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.

The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."

The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.

Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."

The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.

The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.

“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."

The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."

At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."

"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."

That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."

"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."

Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."

"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Updates: 4 Palestinians killed in Gaza as Trump launches ‘Board of Peace’

Board was initially aimed at rebuilding Gaza due to Israeli genocide, but was later pitched as global conflict body.

^{Caolán Magee (Al Jazeera)}