Kobane

Journalist Yıldız Tar: The police beat me

Source: Michelle Demishevich, “Gazeteci Yıldız Tar: Polisler beni dövdü” (“Journalist Yıldız Tar: The police beat me”). T24, 10 October 2014, http://t24.com.tr/haber/polisler-beni-dovdu,273415, accessed on 15/10/2014.

Yıldız Tar, who was beaten by the civil police during protests for Kobane, recounted their experience to T24.

Yıldız Tar[1], the editor of Kaos GL, claimed that they were assaulted by the police during an intervention involving pepper spray while covering the sit-in held in Galatasaray Square to protest the siege of Kobane, Syria by ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant).

“When I said I was a reporter, they ran away”

Yıldız Tar: “Police had begun to push the protesters away from Galatasaray Square towards Tophane. At that moment I saw somebody get injured and taken to hospital in an ambulance. I encountered strong police intervention as I was trying to record the incident. They beat me. They ran away when I told them that I was a reporter.”

Journalist Tar pointed out that, during the protest, the police were particularly tough on those working for independent media. It has been claimed that, during the Kobane protests in Izmir, the police told a reporter from Dicle News Agency[2]: “I know you, I know who you are, choose your side, go there or stay here.”

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[1] In Tar’s words, Yıldız Tar was born in 2010 at Bosphorus University as they rejected the name and the gender assigned to them by their family and the society. They are an activist working with Lambdaistanbul and a reporter writing for independent media outlets. … They hate writing their autobiography and can get quite irritable when labeled as a woman or a man. (Source)

[2] An independent Kurdish news agency.

Call for Solidarity with the People of Kobane!

Source:“Kobane Halkı’yla Dayanışma Çağrısı!” (“Call for Solidarity with the People of Kobane!”), Lambdaistanbul, 3 October 2013, http://www.lambdaistanbul.org/s/etkinlik/kobane-halkiyla-dayanisma-cagrisi/

A civil war erupted in Syria in March 2011; with the attack of ISIS, one of the most brutal organizations to develop in recent history, on the city of Kobane, this civil war has arrived within a few meters of our doorstep. We could say that this period is the cruelest of this civil war. As happens in all wars, the primary targets in Syria are women and children.

At least 70,000 women and children were forced to exile to the district of Suruç in the city of Urfa, following the ISIS attacks on the city of Kobane in Rojava, Kurdistan. In part because Turkey neighbors Kobane, the Turkish public witnessed, via the local and international media, the support that was being provided [by the current Turkish government] to the brutal ISIS gangs. As such, we too, at Lambdaistanbul LGBTI Organization, are witnessing the threat to life in Kobane and to security in the Middle East because of warmongering gangs that are directly or indirectly supported by the Republic of Turkey.

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