“We are all Afrin, we are all YPG,” shout several dozen Kurdish protesters in front of the Russian consulate in the western German city of Bonn, waving flags of the self-declared autonomous region of Syrian Kurdistan.
It’s one of dozens of rallies being organized daily across Germany to protest Turkey’s military offensive against the People’s Protection Units or YPG, a Syrian Kurdish group that controls the Afrin region in northwest Syria.
Evin, one of the protesters in Bonn, said she would take to the streets every day to defend Afrin, and would even allow her children to join the Kurdish nationalist cause. “I am a mother and I wouldn’t stop my children from going to the mountains,” she said, using the Kurdish euphemism for joining the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an insurgency in Turkey for decades and has been banned in Germany since 1993.