In May last year, my stay in Qamishlo was abruptly cut short, because the government of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq closed the border crossing with Rojava and called for all people with foreign passports to return to Iraq with only a few days notice. Now, I have finally returned to continue the collaborative work with the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies. The work on our refrigerator for the revolution is ongoing (a new prototype is in the making) and something new is about to start. The Star Cafe in the centre of town is still there and little has changed, apart from the new table cloths.

Although, sadly, The Star's oldest regular, Abu Selim (see 16 May 2022), passed away during winter. He still remembered some French words and recalled the French soldiers who were in town at the end of the colonial era in the 1940s. In the 1960s, according to the story he most frequently told, he once repaired Saddam Hussein's car, while the latter was in exile in Syria after the failed assassination attempt on military leader General Abd Al-Karim Qasim. He often joined me at my table, mentioning to people that we were both protestants. Abu Selim was 90 years old.

In October last year, Turkish military drones and aircraft bombed many civilian infrastructures in Rojava. Since then, almost all power stations have been out of order. The only electric power sources are now local diesel generators and - for the few people who can afford it - solar panels.
The infrastructure that hardly ever fails is the mobile phone and data coverage in the cities though.

Three companies offer mobile phone and internet services: Rcell, a capitalist endeavour with ties to the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, which is only active in Rojava; Syriatel, mostly owned by members of the Assad family, and MTN Syria, a Saudi-backed company. The latter two only operate in areas controlled by the Syrian regime. Since the regime only occupies a very small area of central Qamishlo, this enormous mast, located next to the square with the statue of Hafez Al-Assad, is equipped to cover as much of the surrounding areas as possible (rectangular antennas) and connect to distant receivers in the other regime areas around (round antennas).
The Rcell network mainly operates through a web of small antennas spread through the cities of Rojava, powered by solar panels and equipped with lithium cells.

Anto at the Armenian pottery factory in Qamishlo is making a new batch of terracotta pots for our Revolution Refridge project. The local-futuristic refrigerator we are developing combines traditional vaporization-based cooling with wet terracotta pots, solar powered air circulation and design that draws from regional folklore.

One of these days they will be baked. Hopefully. Work goes at its own pace here. We have been waiting for our pots for a few months now. Oftentimes, when we visit the factory to ask about the progress, the factory workers turn out to be out of town to go fishing or meet friends and relatives. There seems no incentive to grow the business and the working methods are largely the same as a century ago. Apart from a few battery powered lights on the ceilings, the factory does not use any electricity.

Anto explains that traditionally, the clay of pots used for cooling purposes would be mixed with a certain type of fine grained sand in order to make their surfaces even more porous and hence enable quicker vaporisation. This sand used to come from Deir az-Zor, at the Euphrates river, but due to the security situation it cannot be sourced at the moment.

Seven years after the liberation of Raqqa from Daesh occupation, the traces of the war are still omnipresent. There seems to be no building without bullet and grenade holes. At the same time, a lot has been repaired and put to use again, albeit often in an improvised manner. Because the conflict is ongoing and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria is hardly internationally recognized there has been little outside support.

Together with my colleague Jihan, I visited Şarq University, which is the youngest of the three universities of Rojava, founded in 2021. We discussed possible collaborations on the development and implementation of anarchist methods in technological innovation, connected to the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies.

In between the meetings, our hosts took us on a tour along the historical sites of the city. Most of the sites have suffered a lot of damage during the war. The 12th century Qasr al-Banat ("girls castle") seen here, shows marks of grenade shrapnel on most walls and fires have been lit inside the ruins while it was used as a shelter.

The Autonomous Administration has now initiated some restoration efforts. The city wall is being reconstructed with mud bricks that are produced on site, using historical methods.

From 2014-17, Raqqa was the capital of Daesh in Syria. The organisation had a considerable base of support among the population in some parts of the city. Many people with extremist sympathies in this area of religious politics are still there.

At the old mosque, boys started throwing stones at us from several directions. Adults were standing next to them and didn't intervene. They were too far away to hit us though and we also didn't manage to figure out if they were provoked by Jihan not wearing a veil or me wearing red shoes. Or both.

Ciwana is tracing the history of a remarkable person who lived in Rojava during the last century. Meyrem was an Armenian woman who fled the Ottoman Empire in 1922, during the genocide. In Rojava, she became widely known as a healer and a key figure in the emancipation of kurdish culture. She was a renowned tailor and although she was Armenian, she knew how to make Kurdish traditional clothing. She passed on these skills to many Kurdish women in the region, alongside her knowledge of traditional medicine.

Although it has not been written down in any official history, the story of Meyrem is still known in some villages. Ciwana's uncle is one of her grandchildren and the family still has one picture on which she can be seen, as well as a few photos of Jamilah, the daughter from Meyrem's first marriage to a mullah upon her arrival in Rojava, as part of which she also converted to Islam.

Together with Ciwana and Reshan (not in this picture), who both work at the University of Rojava art department, we are working on a new collaborative work which will entail a public memorial of sorts (combining poetry, sculpture and digital technology), in honour of Meyrem and other important women in civilian culture in Rojava whose stories are rarely included in historical canons. The work will be presented simultaneously in Rojava and somewhere in Europe in spring next year. More details will be revealed along the way...

It is harvest season, so the combine harvesters are out. These machines are often privately owned by workers who are then hired by multiple farmers during harvest time. Outside the season, you regularly see them parked next to houses in residential areas in Qamishlo.

The omnipresence of combine harvesters and other large agricultural machinery traces back to the reign of Hafez al-Assad (1971-2000), during which agriculture in Syria was industrialized and and large monoculture farms were created i  Rojava.

The old 500 SYP note (now worth about 3 dollar cents) shows the prominence of this project as part of Syria's state ideology in the 1990s.

The Autonomous Administration does some effort to stimulate the establishment of farming cooperatives on former state-owned farmland, with more focus on market farming to promote self-sufficiency. But most farms are still privately owned and focused on large scale wheat and barley cultivation.

As seasonal workers are often far from home, many land owners provide encampments for their seasonal workers, some of whom own a means of production like the combine harvester, but many of whom don't.

A phenomenon that appears to have recently gained popularity is the display of videos that show uneventful car rides through German towns. Notably, the content, which is mainly distributed through YouTube, tends to show places that seem entirely devoid of people. There are some other cars, but no people on the streets or in the gardens.

This video played at Yusef's office in downtown Qamishlo, which is now mainly working in interior design, since the demand for custom electronics development, like the traffic light system for the Qamishlo city council (see 30 April 2022), turned out to be too low to become sustainable.