Monthly higlights

📌YPJ Campaign
A campaign under the slogan "We are all YPJ" has been started and is gaining attention both nationally and internationally. The women's movement and organizations of Rojava started this campaign the 26th of April with the aim to have YPJ be part of the integration process.
As we have mentioned before, the role of YPJ and NES's women's organizations more generally, is and will continue to be a stickling point in the negotiations because women's struggle is a foundation of the revolution while at the same time al-Sharaa with his islamic fundamentalist ideology does not want to legitimize women's power and rightful place in society.

📌Unrest and repression under STG
- Amid increasing living costs, protests took place in different cities of Syria, including a Damascus. Prices of oil and gas are being raised by the government, reaching prices impossible to pay for most of the population. The government recently issued a decree announcing that every demonstration has to be approved by the government beforehand or it will be considered illegal.
- Following some clashes in Homs where a government soldier was killed by an Alawite man, a wave of attacks and raids against Alawite population once again took place in that region, not as big as before but still inflaming ethnic tensions and conflicts.
- In Haseke, after government forces removed the sign in Kurdish and arabic to change it for one in arabic and english, a wave of protests erupted around the building, removing the new sign and demanding the one that included kurdish language to be put back.
- In Idlib, a brigade of Uzbek radical islamists clashed with government forces after some of their members were arrested. This is the second incident involving foreign fighters in Idlib after in October some French islamist groups also clashed with government forces on the outskirts of their training camp close to the Turkish border.

📌MIT Aiding Arab Tribal Forces
Reports are circulating about alleged meetings between MIT (Turkish intelligence) and some tribal leaders, to negotiate and build groups able to carry out attacks and killings in kurdish majority areas of north east Syria. Allegedly, MIT is providing weapons, training and funding to some men connected to what has been presented as "tribal armies", building an underground network able to carry out insurgent attacks on Kurdish regions. Those groups may be able to count with tacit government support while allowing government forces to deny any official links, building on tactics of paramilitary counter-guerrilla that the Turkish State has been using for decades against the kurdish movement.

📌Largest Convoy of Returnees to Afrin
A fifth convoy of Afrin refugees departed from Haseke on May 10th, comprising an estimated 1,600 families of Kurds, who were forced to leave their homes in 2018 following the Olive Branch military operation. This has been the largest so far, bigger than the forth one that traveled on early May with around 1,000 families.
The first of these convoys went to Afrin on March 9, and consisted of around 400 displaced families. A second group of around 200 families arrived on April 4, followed by a third convoy of approximately 800 families that reached Afrin on April 14. So in total we are counting around 4000 families that returned to Afrin, even if the conditions there are still unclear as the influence of the Turkish state and its armed groups, comprised of former SNA, still have a heavy presence in the region.