Sawt Falasteen - Turkey football club faces probe over braids clip backing Syrian Kurds

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 Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast -- was guilty of "damaging the reputation of football" by "making ideological propaganda".

Social media has been awash with clips of women braiding their hair in response to a video showing a Syrian soldier holding up a plait which he said had been cut from a Kurdish woman fighter in Raqa, 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 plaiting their hair in support of the unknown woman.

In the northwestern town of Kocaeli, a nurse who posted a braiding clip was detained at the weekend on grounds of making "terrorist propaganda". She was later released but remains under judicial control.

In Arbil, 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 symbolising 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.

D.Qudsi--SF-PST