Meral Çiçek from the Kurdish Women's Relation Office (Navenda Pêwendiyan a Jinên Kurd) REPAK highlighted the latest developments about KDP forces road closures in Shengal as well as the Iraqi governments cooperation with Turkey against the Yazidi people and Kurds. Çiçek also talks about the roots of the current tensions, the impact on women, and the role of Turkey in destabilizing the whole region.

Meral Çiçek spoke to journalist Erem Kansoy and underlined why it is so important to stop the implementation of the 9 October deal signed by the Baghdad and Kurdistan Region governments against Shengal, and what people can do.

The Yazidi community survived the genocide by the Islamic State and is now threatened by Iraqi government and the KDP.

The Iraqi government signed an agreement on Shengal with the KDP on 9 October 2020, in which the Yazidis living in Shengal were ignored and not included in any way at the request of the Turkish State and the USA. The main purpose of this agreement is to destroy the self-governance system that the Yazidi community has built after 74 genocides.

Meral Çiçek was born in 1983 in a Kurdish guest-worker family in Germany. She started political and women’s activism at the age of 16 within the Kurdish Women’s Peace Office in Dusseldorf. While studying Political Science, Sociology and History at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt she started to work as reporter and editor for the only daily Kurdish newspaper in Europe, Yeni Ozgur Politika, for which she still writes a weekly column. In 2014 she co-founded the Kurdish Women’s Relations Office (REPAK) in Southern Kurdistan (Northern Iraq). She is also editorial board member of the Jineoloji journal.