Eight years on the attack on Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood

On February 16, 2016, a day after the anniversary of the international conspiracy on the leader Abdullah Ocalan, and after the liberation of the Tal Rifaat district from mercenaries, dozens of mercenary groups launched a violent attack on the neighborhood, which its people were so valiant in defending.

The people of the neighborhood managed to defeat the groups supplied by the Turkish occupation state that used all types of weapons, including internationally prohibited toxic chemical gases.

Hundreds of neighborhood residents were martyred and injured, in which about 2,600 homes and shops were destroyed, according to neighborhood council statistics.

The people of the neighborhood, hundreds of whom met Leader Abdullah Ocalan during his time in Syria for nearly 20 years, all turned into defenders of the neighborhood.

With the Democratic Society Movement declaring a general mobilization in Sheikh Maqsoud, dozens of his sons and daughters headed to the fronts, and formed, along with the People’s Protection Units and the Women’s Protection Units, an impenetrable shield against the mercenaries.

Women also actively participated in this resistance. The women of the neighborhood, who took the martyr Kulah Salmo as their role model, participated on the fronts and in operations to treat the wounded, in addition to the elderly mothers preparing food for the male and female fighters on the fronts.

The resistance to Sheikh Maqsoud was not limited to the Kurds only, but the Arab component actively participated in that resistance, and perhaps the martyrdom of the only surgeon in the neighborhood, Dr. Shahid Al-Jumayan, who was born in Deir ez-Zor, is the most prominent example of the joint resistance of the Kurds and Arabs in Sheikh Maqsoud.

Abu Yazan, one of the fighters who participated in the historical resistance to Sheikh Maqsoud, says, “At the beginning of the formation of the People’s Protection Units in the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood in Aleppo, we did not have a weapon, but the insistence on self-defense, protecting the people, and the people’s solidarity with their forces.”

The fighter added, "All sons and daughters of the people participated in this historic resistance."

Leader Ocalan points out in his book (The Sociology of Freedom) that Kurdistan society and the Middle East should repel the cultural, moral, political and moral invasion using legitimate self-defense mechanisms according to the principles of the revolutionary people’s war.

At the end of his speech, the fighter in the People's Protection Units, Abu Yazan, pledged to follow the path of the martyrs until achieving the physical freedom of Commander Abdullah Ocalan and liberating all the occupied areas from the Turkish occupation state.

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ANHA