French author Hervé Hamon penned an editorial for Le Télégramme expressing his concerns about the fate of the Kurds caught between Iraq, Syria and Turkey, whose president, Erdogan, is suspected of wanting to annihilate this people.

“They call their country Rojava and they conquered it in 2012, during the "Arab Spring". They built a territory between the Tigris and the Euphrates that is four times the size of Lebanon, which they administer according to strong principles: secularism, equality between women and men, and concern for the environment. Against Assad, and with their Christian and Arab allies of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

During the Syrian war, we admired their courage, especially that of their women in battle. They were our bulwark against the Islamic State, which they drove out, at the cost of 36,000 deaths, from Kobane (2014) to Raqqa (2017), the 'capital', which signed the end of the so-called Islamist 'caliphate'. We saw them as our forward point, our shield, but Donald Trump, in 2019, turned his back, leaving the field open for the Turks to dislocate what had been fashioned. Erdogan, who has built an 800 km wall between Turkey and Rojava, has only one obsession: to annihilate the Kurdish people as his predecessors once did to the Armenians. He intends to reinstall the Islamists on the territory where Daesh had established its hold and, on four occasions, attacked the Kurds without the Westerners, their "friends", flinching.

In the east, Iraq has set up a real blockade. In the west, Turkish infiltrators are practising ethnic cleansing while the Ottoman army is bombing schools and villages. In the south, Assad, who can count on the vigilant support of Iran, is waiting for the moment of revenge. We know that the Turks are preparing for the ultimate assault. They control the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and there is a lack of drinking water for livestock and crops. Rojava is on the verge of famine, waiting for war. Erdogan's drones carefully spot their targets, hit military leaders - seven of them, mostly women, have been killed.

While the reaction to the despicable attempted murder of Salman Rushdie is being debated on the newsstands, are we aware that the Islamic State is threatening to re-establish itself in Kurdish lands, thanks to one of the main members of NATO, our "ally"? The right of the Kurds is the right of peoples to self-determination, as in Ukraine. And our incomprehensible apathy is fraught with perils that will inevitably reach us.”