Can Canton Zurich Learn from War? World Politics, Canva, Canon, and a Cannabis Shop in Basel.

Some days, you just can't help but shake your head. Here in Switzerland, we're hashing out in the city council whether the new cannabis shop in Basel is disrupting the neighborhood's peace, while just a few thousand miles away, history is being rewritten—with blood, with treaties that aren't worth the paper they're written on, and with one age-old question: Can you really trust the superpowers?

We're talking about the Kurds. Again. And once again, they're at the center of a conflict that could upend the entire region. The headlines are coming fast and furious: The head of US counterterrorism, Joseph Kent, resigned because he could no longer square the Iran war with his conscience. At the same time, Iranian drones are striking Kurdish Peshmerga positions in northern Iraq. And right in the middle of it all: that same, weighty question, as heavy as the mountains the fighters call home.

A People Divided, Like a Canvas Mock-Up

Imagine you're designing the image of a nation on Canva. You draw borders, apply colors, add in the peoples. That's essentially what happened in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne: a redrawing of the map where the Kurds were simply forgotten. They were promised a state—but nothing was delivered. Since then, they've been the world's largest stateless nation, and history keeps repeating itself with the cruel relentlessness of an infinite loop.

Today, 103 years later, they're back in the same spot. The US and Israel would love for the Kurds to provide the ground troops to topple the Iranian regime. But the Kurds aren't naive. They remember 1975, when Henry Kissinger dropped them like a hot potato after the Algiers Agreement. They remember 1991, when the uprising against Saddam Hussein was crushed in blood while the West looked away. And they remember 2026—just two months ago—when the Trump administration once again threw the Kurds in Syria under the bus.

The saying, "The Kurds have no friends but the mountains," isn't just a poetic turn of phrase. It's the bitter lesson learned over generations.

Between Canon and Kalashnikov

I spoke last week with a photographer who just got back from the Iraq-Iran border. He showed me pictures taken with a Canon EOS—crystal clear, almost inappropriately aesthetic for what they depicted. Young fighters from Komala, the reform faction, camping out in the mountains. Training, waiting, hoping.

One of them, a PAK commander, told a journalist on the ground: "If we cross the border, the Americans are supposed to secure the sky for us." Sounds simple. But it's not. Because the US is hesitating. Trump first said he'd be "all for it" if the Kurds made a move—then he backtracked: "The war is complicated enough without dragging the Kurds into it."

For the Kurds, it's déjà vu all over again. They know they're being used as bargaining chips. That their dreams of autonomy, or even statehood, are only important in Washington as long as they serve the purpose of weakening Tehran. A senior Kurdish official put it bluntly: "The Kurdish people overwhelmingly reject the Islamic Republic's regime. But they're also terrified of being abandoned once more."

A New Unity—Or Just a Flash in the Pan?

There is a glimmer of hope. For the first time in decades, five major Kurdish parties in Iran have joined forces: the PDKI, Komala, PAK, Khabat, and PJAK. They're calling themselves the "Coalition of Political Forces from Iranian Kurdistan." It's a mouthful, but it's political dynamite. These groups used to fight each other; now, they're united by a common enemy.

Mustafa Hijri of the PDKI, often called the "Barzani of Eastern Kurdistan," is driving the effort. And they've even got a plan: federalism. Not an independent state, but an Iran where Kurds finally get their rights—education in their own language, cultural autonomy, their own administration. "We are Iranians, but we are Kurdish Iranians, and we want to stay in Iran," emphasizes Razgar Alani, the PDKI representative in London.

Will that message resonate in Tehran? Probably not. The regime automatically labels every Kurd a "separatist." But the math is simple: If you suppress a population for 47 years, bomb their villages, imprison and execute their youth, you can't be surprised when that population rebels. The 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement was just the tip of the iceberg.

What's the Takeaway? A Little, Very Swiss List

I know, you might be asking yourself: What does this have to do with me? With my daily life in Zurich, Bern, or Geneva? More than you think. Because while the world out there is falling apart, we have decisions to make here. Let me break it down in a list—pragmatic, very Swiss, if you will:

• Cannabis shop: They're popping up like mushrooms in Basel and elsewhere. While we debate opening hours and youth protection, somewhere in the Middle East, drug money might be funding militias. Not directly, not obviously, but it's a small world. Regulating the legal market takes money away from illegal structures. That's foreign policy, too.
• Canon and Canvas: The images we see of Kurdish fighters are taken with high-precision cameras and often retouched with design tools to sway global opinion. Propaganda is so last century; today, it's all about visual communication. Next time you see an image on Instagram, ask yourself: Who staged this, and for what purpose?
• CANAL+: The streaming service airs documentaries about war, flight, displacement. We consume them on our screens while lounging comfortably on our sofas. But behind every one of those documentaries are real people. Real tears. Real lives destroyed.

The Patience of the Mountains

A friend working for an aid organization in northern Iraq told me on the phone: "You know what impresses me most? The patience of the people here. They've been waiting for a century. They've learned that the superpowers come and go, but the mountains remain."

Maybe that's the biggest lesson for us in Switzerland. We live in a country that's been stable for centuries, that hasn't been conquered, that knows its borders. The Kurds don't have that. They live in a perpetual state of "what if." What if the US actually keeps its promises this time? What if the alliance of parties holds? What if Iran really does fall?

Three questions beginning with "what if" that are quite literally life or death.

Until then, they hold out. In the camps along the border, in the mountains, in the barren villages. They clean their weapons, they pray, they hope. And they watch as the West hesitates yet again. History teaches us one thing: Those who use the Kurds as a tool should be prepared for bloody hands. But those who ignore them might be squandering the last chance for a stable region.

With that in mind, let's keep our eyes on the Middle East. Even if it's raining in Basel and the cannabis shop around the corner just opened. The world has gotten smaller. And what happens today in the Kurdish mountains could shape our asylum applications, our security debates, and our very idea of freedom tomorrow.

Stay vigilant.