Kurdish football club in Turkey faces probe over braids clip backing Syrian Kurds

28.01.2026

By SCF

Source:https://stockholmcf.org/kurdish-football-club-in-turkey-faces-probe-over-braids-clip-backing-syrian-kurds/

Turkey’s main Kurdish football team is to face action by the national football organization for sharing a video in solidarity with Kurdish forces in Syria, the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) has said, according to the Agence France-Presse.

A 20-second clip, posted on the Amedspor club’s social media accounts, showed a woman sitting in their stadium having her hair braided to the soundtrack of a song featuring the widely used Kurdish slogan “Women, life, freedom.”

Over the past week, hair braiding has become a symbolic show of solidarity with Syrian Kurds as Damascus has pressed a military offensive in northeastern areas formerly part of the Kurds’ de facto autonomous administration.

In a statement released Tuesday the TFF said in sharing the video, the club, which is based in Diyarbakır, the main city in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, was guilty of “damaging the reputation of football” by “disseminating ideological propaganda.”

Social media has been flooded with clips of women braiding their hair in response to a video showing a Syrian soldier holding up a braid that he said had been cut from a Kurdish woman fighter in Raqqa, which the Syrian military recently retook from Kurdish-led forces.

Although the claim could not be independently verified, it sparked an online backlash and the solidarity braids.

Many MPs from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party, the third largest in parliament, also shared clips of them braiding their hair in support of the unknown woman.

In the northwestern town of Kocaeli, a nurse who posted a braiding clip was detained on the weekend on grounds of spreading “terrorist propaganda.” She was later released but remains under judicial supervision.

In Arbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, dozens of women gathered on Friday for a mass braiding solidarity event.

Braids have become an emblem of Kurdish women fighters, whose images filled front pages for years during their many battles against Islamic State group militants in Syria.

In Kurdish culture, braids are considered a symbol of beauty but also of resistance and strength, particularly symbolizing Kurdish women fighters.

The Kurdish slogan, “Jin Jiyan Azadi” — which translates as “Women, Life, Freedom” — became the slogan of 2022 anti-government protests in Iran sparked by the death in custody of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini.