Message from Rojava: Failure is not an option, our revolution continues
Transcript of a voice message from internationalist fighter from Rojava, sent on 19-01-2026.
Hello comrades, we are sending greetings from Rojava and we want to talk about the mood of the society, of the people here, because you are probably all reading the news. You are informed about the situation and yes, it is true that the situation is tense and that the revolution is under threat, but what is not in the news and, what is equally important as reading the news, is the mentality of the people and what the people are feeling and doing right now here.
What we can say from going to demonstrations or visiting families is that the mood is the opposite of the news. It it crazy being a socialist not from Kurdistan like myself to see this collective spirit here. For example, 13 or 14 years old young women walking at marches, proud with their Kurdish books in their hands. They want to defend education in their mother tongue that is connected with their existence. They tell us you only exist if you organise, you need to resist to exist. This gives us a lot of morale to do the works as internationalists to defend this revolution.
The other day we went to a family and they asked us to sing them a song, the only song we all knew by heart was Bella Ciao so we sang them Bella Caio and they responded with the song Our Heart Wants to Go on to Struggle. This was sang by a 60 year old mother. As she was singing her song, her son and Grandon returned from Aleppo having fled from there. They greeted each other after having survived the massacre with, of course, grief but also a lot of happiness; you could feel the sense of struggle between them. The 6 year old Grandson said to us Berxedan Jiyane meaning Resistance is Life. I think it is really important that we do not forget this and that we do not fall into this mindset of defeat that we often fall into, especially in Europe. Always when we get this feeling that we have already lost, that there is not much to win, we must remind ourselves this is exactly the mentality that the people within the structures that we are fighting against want us to have.
Hope is resistance, and building up this hope in yourself, in the comrades around you is crucial. It is also something that we owe the people here, they have been doing this for decades now – building up this hope for us, for themselves and for everyone. It is our task now not only to do practical works but also to build up this ideological self-defence, to build up hope around us. It is what is visible here, let’s consider this a revolutionary task: to embody the spirit of the revolution, which is a spirit of resistance until the end of victory. This has been show historically in the movement with the prison resistance in the 1980s when 80% of the leading figures of the movement were imprisoned and it looked like there was no future for this movement but 40 years later there is a whole territory liberated by the same movement. It is something that we should understand as a crucial point in the democratic river that we are all part of, and it is our task now to pour water into this river both practically and ideologically.
Failure is not an option. Our revolution continues because we all believe it does. It is dependent on this belief. It is not only a belief but it is also a truth. It is the truth we are seeking and it is the truth we are building. This spirit that we can see here, we want to send to you via this voice message. We believe in you and we hope you keep believing in us, in this revolution here. We are sending a lot of greetings and a lot of success.
Berxedan Jiyane – Resistance is Life
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