Between 2 and 3 May 2015, we delivered the first shipment of humanitarian aid to Rojava, the Kurdish-majority area of Syria. Thanks to the support of the Tavola Valdese's Eight Per Thousand Office, it was possible less than two months after our first mission to the area.
We are back in Rojava. During our first visit, we had promised to support this battle to build a peaceful future. We had assured our friends of support in their defence against the barbarity of Daesh.
We crossed the only section of the Iraq-Syria border that remains outside the control of Daesh, a stretch of the Tigris river controlled by Iraqi Kurdish authorities, to bring a first load of medicines to Rojava, thanks to the extraordinary contribution of the Eight by Mile Office of the Waldensian Table.
Medicines which were specifically requested by the Kurdish Red Crescent in Rojava and which will be distributed in the coming weeks in the hospitals of DerikAl Malikiah and Qamishlo, as well as in the Newroz refugee camp. The drugs, which cannot be found in the area, are specifically for the treatment of cancer patients and will help around 6,000 people living in the Cizire Canton.
he destination of our humanitarian convoy was the new Kurdish Red Crescent Centre, where workers provide health services and medicines free of charge to the population of Derik. In the centre, in addition to the pharmacy, there is a paediatric room for women and children and a surgery room.
The Centre's medical workers, mostly volunteers, have a mobile unit with which they are able to reach remote areas of the Canton and those most exposed to Daesh attacks. Doctors who risk their lives on a daily basis to do their job and try to provide an essential service to a population caught between the grip of Daesh and the de facto embargo imposed by Turkey.
A minimal but necessary gesture towards the difficulties Rojava is forced to face in order for the democratic principles underpinning regional autonomy to survive.
During our mission we had met the new mayor of Derik/Al Malikiah: a 27-year-old woman, an engineer, elected as an independent because of her expertise in infrastructure development. Her election was a pleasant confirmation for us that the institutions of participatory democracy are really working here, despite the emergency of war.
Accompanied by Red Crescent doctors, we visited the refugee camps. We had already visited the Newroz camp: it is still home to over 5,000 refugees, but last summer over 100,000 had arrived here, and the few volunteer medics had been faced with a real humanitarian emergency with thousands of medical visits every day.
In the meantime, a new camp has sprung up, for about 50 Iraqi families from Zummar province. There is nothing in this camp apart from tents, everything from toilets to a children's centre is missing, and no international humanitarian organisation has ever entered it.
We met with the 'Women's House', a central institution in the construction of the pluralist democracy project. When we arrived there were women of all ages, both Kurdish and Arab, gathered in an assembly to discuss how to concretely deal with the cases of women who need help. The centre has the possibility to sit as a civil party in court in gender violence trials. The activists told us of their immense efforts to reach out door to door to every woman in the canton and explain what their rights are, trying to involve them in social and political life.
The next step will be to open other paths of concrete solidarity towards Rojava. We will do this by sending a new shipment of medicines shortly in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, as our friends from the Red Crescent have asked us, by organising some training on trauma care.
