It is with great happiness that we announce the liberation of the strategic Tishreen Dam which was responsible for providing electricity and water to the north of the country, particularly to the Aleppo region, which also houses Kobane.
The liberation of the dam, which had been under ISIS control since 2014, means that now the city of Kobane can have fresh water as well as regain the source of its electricity.
The control of the dam meant that ISIS also controlled the water supply to the canton as well as seriously affecting the rebuilding process. The canton was forced to dig 100’s of wells within the city of Kobane and the surrounding areas to provide water to the over 200,000 people who had returned to the canton. The project cost over a million dollars. The city was also running largely on electricity generators, which are often expensive, unreliable, environmentally unfriendly and noisy. As a result, many of the essential services such as schools and hospitals were directly reliant on generators. For instance, the organization Heyva Sor a Kurd was relying on a generator to support its work in the makeshift hospital. Earlier this year a breakdown in the generator, and a lack of a backup generator, meant that the hospital was out of service for 15 days. Many hospital equipment require ongoing and reliable 24 hour access to electricity, which reduced the capacity of the current hospitals to provide adequate healthcare.
The rebuilding of Kobane is the other side of the resistance against the barbaric and evil forces of ISIS. We rebuild so that a new future is possible and so that we can create a new society based on mutual coexistence as different ethnic and religious groups which had been traditionally pitted against each other.