Mardin

So if we're thinking about the 1860s, the 1870s, we're talking about mostly nomadic pastoralists.

Of course, cities on the ring of this region, Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Mosul, Mardin, these are cities that are profoundly connected to these... circuits of nomadic motion in terms of trade.

And so that, you know, it's important to remember that those connections are there.

We shouldn't think of this as simply an isolated place.

Um, but you know, there are other examples like, uh, Ilgazi.

We talked about him, Ilgazi of Mardin.

We talked about him, uh, I think in the bonus episode, the commander, uh, of the Muslims at the Field of Blood.

Um, these guys who sort of poked their heads up from, from this crowd of, uh, undifferentiated city, uh, rulers and try to say, hey, uh, everybody follow me.

Freelance reporter Natalie Carney tells us how the project is helping a new generation build confidence and a sense of belonging.

Thirteen-year-old Bashir practices his juggling at Sirkane Social Circus School in the southeastern city of Mardin, not far from the border with Syria.

Here, he is taught that dropping the ball is all part of the learning process.

When he first arrived with his family from Syria, he says he wasn't sure he could do any of it.

much.

Sirkane's co-director Pinar Demiral says that's perhaps the clearest sign of the power of this project.

Sirkane is based in one of Mardin's poorest neighborhoods, home to Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian families.

When they come to Sirkani, they can play, they can be trial.

Yes.

So the region is what is nowadays fully in Turkish territory and precisely within the provinces of Mardin, the eastern part of the province of Mardin, the western part of the province of Şırnak and then the southern part of Batman province and the Arpaki provinces.

It's geographically more easy to delineate because it's a very clear highlands area that is separated from the main plateau islands and it's bordered on the northern part by the Upper Tigris Valley, which is a consistent plain on the north.

And then the Tigris actually draws the region limits, edges, with this path.

This is an urban bias that we have a lot in the region because of the lack of research in the archaeological field work in many of the main cities.

But we have big data from Edessa, from Tella, which would be Costanzi or Birashehir presently.

We have data from Mardin and from all the data, of course, the main centers of the region and then the monasteries.

And the monasteries of Turabdin are also like a testimony in that sense, how they did use Syriac to speak to their faithfuls in the mosaic inscription, for example, after the 7th century.

Following the dissolution decision of the SDF, the Syrian wing of the PKK terrorist organization, two thousand Turkish citizens and around five hundred Iranian Iraqi nationals, totaling two thousand five hundred terrorists, have begun a phased transfer to northern Iraq.

The paper also refers to a recent interview with one of the PKK leaders, Murat Karayılan, who said that the organization has withdrawn all their armed forces engaged in covert operations from major cities like Istanbul, as well as all forces from Diyarbakır and Mardin.

Now, that's all for today.

Thank you for watching.

He's the son of the ambassador of Israel to the United States.

He was injured at a checkpoint near the Mardin area a few weeks ago on Sukkot.

Very critically injured.

slowly, slowly improving, but it's still a very, very, I think there was a surgery today.

Um, so it is ...

What makes this region is these, these extremely diverse r- geographic landscape that on the one hand you have mountains, on the other hand, you have large plains, like the plain of Diyarbakir, like the plain of Harput, uh, like plain of Palu, and the pasture lands, the southern pasture lands that are in the, um, uh, kind of particularly on the, uh, today's northern Syria, um, as well as, uh, south of Mardin, but also the pasture lands that are lying between or laying between this, um, between these, uh, mountains.

If you travel, let's say you are traveling from Diyarbakir and going further north, um, uh, north, northeast, you will kind of really drive in a geography that is constantly changing.

The altitudes, the magnitude of the geography constantly change.

I think at one point you say that a line of poetry that begins in Kurdish could end in Armenian or vice versa or ...

I, I, I think there was something about finishing each other's cigarettes even, [laughs] some- some- some quote like that.

That is, uh, something that from, uh, comes from, um, uh, actually one of the, uh, European, uh, travel accounts, uh, w- who visited Mardin and was shocked to see Armenians, Syriacs, and Kurds are smoking together [laughs] and sharing their cigarettes with each other.

Just like something, um, in European imagination, uh, is, is they can't cover it.