Rojava project on TIME Magazine

April 19, 2014

Glad to see my work from Syrian Kurdistan published on Time LightBox. I spent around 3 week in Kuridstan during October 2013.
Here the work I done with stils and motion and a text with my experience on the ground.
The multimedia has been directed with Eduardo Matas.

TIME LightBox: Rojava, Syria: Fabio Bucciarelli in the Land of the Kurds

Photographer Fabio Bucciarelli spent three weeks of October 2013 in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, and for two of those weeks was based solely in Rojava, a section of Kurdistan located in northern Syria. Rojava was largely spared from the fighting in the ongoing conflict until early last year, and last November a de facto Kurdish government was established in the region. About two million people in Rojava are part of the some 30 million Kurds—divided between Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria—who have lost every fight for an independent state. As the Syrian civil war spirals into its fourth year, with more than 140,000 killed, 3 million refugees, millions more who are internally displaced and no end in sight, the Kurds lack a place at the negotiating table, but they may actually benefit when the fighting finally ceases.

As I got off the boat, after teetering across the Tigris River from Iraq, I think about how much Syria has changed since the last time I was here. We have seen thousands of deaths, millions of people forced to become refugees and the specter of chemical weapons. The demand for democracy and freedom, once screamed by the rebels, has all but disintegrated, as it’s now a fight for land and resources. The Syrian government has largely lost control of Rojava, allowing the Syrian-Kurdish paramilitary troops called the Popular Protection Units (YPG) to rise in their absence. YPG was once crucial to keeping out extremist groups, but since last spring, militants within Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have aimed to expand their control and conquer territory in the northern land. [more…]