Activists from the Kurdish youth movements TCŞ (Tevgera Ciwanên Şoreşger) and TekoJIN (Jinên Ciwan ên Têkoşer) have founded the Şehîd Fîraz Dağ Youth Commune in London. Fîraz Dağ was the nom de guerre of journalist and filmmaker Mehmet Aksoy, who was an employee of the media center of the People's Defense Units (YPG) and died in an ISIS attack at the age of 32 while working on a documentary about the liberation offensive of the city of Raqqa on September 26, 2017.

The youth activists first visited the grave of Mehmet Aksoy and then gathered at the Kurdish Community Center, where a film about his life was shown. In a statement on the newly founded youth commune, the determination to continue the struggle for the freedom of Abdullah Öcalan and the entire Kurdish people was emphasized: "We will not give up our struggle until all fascists and occupiers have left our country."

According to the founding declaration, the youth commune intends to advocate the "democratic confederalism" model put forward by Öcalan as an alternative to capitalist modernity and to organize itself accordingly. Mehmet Aksoy is described by the activists as a role model for all young people.

Mehmet Aksoy

There is already a Fîraz Dağ School in the Kurdish Community Center in London with courses for children and adults, as well as a children's choir of the same name. Mehmet Aksoy's family comes from Elbistan in northern Kurdistan. He was born in 1988 in Malatya as the eldest child of Zeynep and Kalender Aksoy. When he was four years old, his family moved to London. There, he attended Leyton and Barnet College and began to get involved in London's Kurdish community center as a teenager. As a result, he became better and better acquainted with the Kurdish freedom struggle. Of particular importance for his political development were his involvement with the writings of the Black Panther Party activist George Jackson and Abdullah Öcalan's ideas on democratic confederalism.

After graduating with a first-class degree in Film Studies from Queen Mary University of London in 2007, Mehmet Aksoy was co-founder and editor-in-chief of the English-language internet platform Kurdish Question and part of other journalistic projects. Especially after the ISIS attack on Shengal in August 2014, he was active at a high pace to inform and organize the Kurdish population and the European public.

In parallel with his journalistic endeavors, Mehmet Aksoy remained interested in film and completed an MA in Film Production at Goldsmiths University of London in 2014. His work Panfilo (2014), an apocalyptic tale about three generations of men coming to terms with loss and death in rural Italy, won awards at the Italian Short Film Festival and the UK Student Film Awards. He was also active as program director of the annual London Kurdish Film Festival.