The Iraqi army's attempt to fence in the Maxmur Camp with barbed wire and turn it into a huge prison has been stopped for the time being by the resistance of the residents. In the early morning, military forces with special units and police support arrived with dozens of armoured vehicles in front of the self-governing camp in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq). Thousands of people protested against the operation.

A delegation of the Maxmur People's Council negotiated with the operation management. After hours of talks, Filiz Budak made a statement on behalf of the People's Council, saying the following:

"The Iraqi army wanted to surround the area with soldiers and police. Our will and our right to live are being disregarded. As the people of Maxmur, we have been resisting subordinating our will to anyone for about thirty years. We will continue to do so. The Iraqi government does not solve our problems and does not defend us. Now the camp is to be equipped with observation towers in the surrounding area, as if that would do any good against air attacks. It is pretended that there is no other problem. We have been negotiating for over an hour. The army is desperate to put up these towers and claims that the people are in favour of it. Supposedly, only the People's Council and some individuals are against it. We have replied that the people have a will of their own and are here on the ground. The people of Maxmur will never accept this. They have been resisting for thirty years. As a people, we will not back down under any circumstances. This is the people's decision. We will resist. If necessary, we will hold out here day and night. We have not surrendered to the Turkish state and we will not surrender to the Iraqi state. Resistance means life. Our resistance will succeed, just like in Rojava and Shengal."

The crowd reacted to the statement by chanting "Biji Berxwedana Mexmûrê" (Long live the resistance of Maxmur).

In recent years, similar attempts to fence the camp in with barbed wire have failed due to the resistance of the people. Maxmur Camp is located about 60 kilometres southwest of Hewlêr (Erbil), the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. More than 12,000 people live in the camp. Most of them were forced to leave their villages in Northern Kurdistan in the 1990s due to the repression of the Turkish state and the scorched-earth policy. After an odyssey of several years and stays in various camps, they founded the Maxmur Camp on the edge of the desert in 1998. The camp population thus forms the largest Kurdish refugee community worldwide.

The grassroots-democratically organised and self-governing camp is a thorn in Turkey's side. In recent years, there have been repeated air strikes on Maxmur, most recently in August 2022, when a father of six was killed by a drone. In an air strike three months earlier, a civilian was fatally injured by the Turkish army. These war crimes have remained without consequences to this day.

Officially, Maxmur is under the protection of the UNHCR, but in practice the UN is only nominally present. The organisation left the camp during the attacks by ISIS in 2014 and did not return afterwards.