Kobanê - Eine Stadt im Widerstand - Buch

A city in resistance

In autumn 2014, the city of Kobanê, which until then was hardly known internationally, was attacked by the jihadist fighters of the ‘Islamic State’. After a desperate street battle, in which the Kurdish fighters ended up with only one street left, a global solidarity movement succeeded in persuading the USA and other countries to intervene in the fight and support the resistance from the air. Over the course of January 2015, the attackers are driven out of the badly destroyed city. This was followed by unprecedented reconstruction and a return of refugees, but also an increasingly aggressive war of attrition by Turkey through an economic blockade and drone attacks.

The political scientist and social and cultural anthropologist Thomas Schmidinger has documented the destruction, reconstruction and Turkey's protracted attrition tactics in words and pictures during numerous trips from 2015 to 2024, thus making a piece of resistance history visible before our eyes.