.Antifascist Forces in Afrin – AFFA

Antifascist Forces in Afrin (AFFA) is a military group of leftist revolutionaries defending Afrin and its people from the invasion of the Turkish state and its Salafist proxies.

Alongside non-affiliated individuals and members of Turkish and Kurdish communist revolutionary parties, Şehîd Michael Israel Brigade is the main component of AFFA.

Our fight against ISIS over the last 18+ months has steeled our comradeship. Having known, fought and lived with Michael Israel we decided it was fitting to name our unit after him given the context of his martyrdom: Michael was killed by Turkish airstrikes as he was fighting ISIS.

Antifascist Forces in Afrin was founded as an emergency response to Turkish president Erdogan’s heinous attempt to crush the Rojava revolution and its peoples in their most peaceful region.

Many of us are former commanders and fighters from the International Freedom Battalion and various YPG units. After the hard-won battle to liberate Rakka from ISIS many of us had moved onto work in the civil and social side of the revolution while others went on to train newly arrived international fighters.

In that relatively peaceful period between the Rakka operation and the Battle for Afrin our faith in the Rojava revolution was compounded by the remarkable progress we witnessed in the lives of the people here. We have now come together once again in this most crucial and decisive battle against fascist attack.

We fight mainly as our own unit in the Şehîd Michael Israel Brigade as well as in mixed assault teams with our comrades from YPG, YPJ, TIKKO, BÖG, THKP-C/MLSPB, TKEP-L

We are now all fully engaged in the defence of Afrin as active units. Having already taken some wounded amongst our ranks, and due to the general logistical pressures of war, our ability to conduct and release public communications may be sporadic in the future as the battle hardens. So please be patient and share our communiques widely. While you wait on our messages please share all other pro-Afrin media.

Until now we have been disappointed at the lack of international support for Afrin. But now with protests and solidarity actions in full swing across the world it is your duty to partake in the fight for Afrin just as many leftists before us did so for Vietnam. Whilst the enemy has an armed presence in Afrin its soft underbelly is exposed to you: its international reputation, its economic ties and its political institutions. Civil and popular actions worldwide against the Turkish state can in many ways be more effective than any number of bullets we fire. This is a political fight as much it is a military battle.

Defend Afrin.

Death to Fascism.

No Pasaran.

Şehîd Michael Israel Brigade

Antifascist Forces in Afrin – AFFA.

15th February 2018