As Turkey continues its war against the Kurdish people and their allies in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Kurds fight for genuine democracy, gender liberation and ecology, a group of more than 70 politicians including former Prime Minister of Italy, academics and human rights advocates from all over the globe said in a statement released under the newly established International Kurdish Solidarity Collective.

“Today standing in solidarity with the Kurds means standing in defence of democratic futures for everyone,” the group said.

With Nobel Peace Prize laureates and former and current MPs and former prime minister and party leaders among them, the collective said NATO was enabling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s policy of occupation and annihilation in Syria and Iraq.

The collective also called on NATO, Sweden and Finland to “decline to implement Erdoğan’s antidemocratic and illegitimate demands”, and to revoke the implicit green-light they have given to Turkey’s attacks against Syrian and Iraqi Kurds.

NATO “made a dirty deal revolving around the Kurds, in effect giving Erdoğan permission to carry out ethnic cleansing”, they said, in order to secure Turkey’s approval for Finland and Sweden to be able to join the military alliance.

The International Kurdish Solidarity Collective accused Erdoğan of enabling and assisting the Islamic State (ISIS). “His regime continues to occupy parts of Rojava (Northern Syria) to this day, with terrible reports of forced deportation, torture and murder of its inhabitants as a result,” they said.

NATO’s appeasement of Turkey’s demands “amounts to nothing less than backstabbing”, the collective said.

Among the collective’s members are former leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’alema and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis, and Kurdish-Swedish independent deputy Amineh Kakabaveh.

Kakabaveh herself was targeted by Erdoğan’s followers in recent months, when she was cited among those of whom Turkey demanded extradition for.

“We will unite against Turkey’s duplicitous actions that terrorise the legitimate representatives of the Kurdish people and their allies,” they said. “Together we can defeat policies of endless war and ensure that what is happening to the Kurds today does not continue, and does not happen to any other vulnerable groups across the globe – now or in the future.”

The full text can be found on the Kurdish Solidarity Collective website.