Amedspor, a football club from the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, could secure promotion to the Turkish Super Lig on Saturday, a milestone that has sparked widespread excitement among millions of Kurds both in Turkey and abroad.
“If we go up, we’ll be the happiest people in the world,” said Ercan Simsek, a 52-year-old fan who is used to seeing his team in the lower divisions. He traveled to Istanbul last month hoping to attend an important match but was left outside the stadium with his red and green scarf because he didn’t have a ticket.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re not here only for football. We’re here because this is a matter of pride,” he told AFP at the time. “Amedspor is the pride of Diyarbakir, the pride of the southeast, the pride of the Kurds!” he enthused.
“We are more than a club. We are not just a football team,” said Nahit Eren, Amedspor’s president. The club typically plays home matches in front of around 18,000 fans, a number seven times higher than the average attendance in the Turkish second division.
“Amedspor is an identity. It’s colors, values, a stance,” Eren explained to AFP. The club adopted the historical Kurdish name for Diyarbakir, “Amed,” a decade ago, a move that still provokes anger from many Turkish nationalist fans.
“Propaganda”
Amedspor, which mixes Turkish and Kurdish — a language without official status in Turkey — in its social media posts, was penalized by the Turkish Football Federation in late January after being accused of making “propaganda” for Kurdish fighters. The punishment stemmed from a video the club made supporting a female Kurdish fighter whose braid had been cut off and displayed as a trophy by a Syrian army soldier in northern Syria.
The club president, who condemns “attempts to drag Amedspor into various controversies,” also laments the insults the team receives during almost every away game, which he sees as a symptom of discrimination against Kurds, who make up a fifth of Turkey’s 86 million population.
While Athletic Bilbao in Spain prides itself on fielding only players born or trained in the Basque Country, Amedspor’s squad includes a majority of Kurdish players alongside foreigners, such as top scorer Mbaye Diagne from Senegal.
“Athletic is a centenary club. Amedspor is only 10 years old,” said Eren, who admires the Basque club but defends his decision to “not practice any discrimination” when building the team.
“The Cement of the Kurds”
A promotion for Amedspor to the Turkish Super Lig would coincide with the slow peace process underway between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrilla group, which began in late 2024. The old city of Diyarbakir still bears scars from the conflict, which escalated in 2015 and 2016 between the Turkish army and the Kurdish armed group. The conflict has claimed over 50,000 lives since 1984.
Amedspor would not be the first Kurdish club to reach Turkey’s top division, but the last one did so nearly two decades ago.
What makes Amedspor special is that it is an entity with a “claimed Kurdish identity,” explained Ceylan Akça, a deputy from the pro-Kurdish DEM party in Diyarbakir, noting that the city “is considered by Kurds worldwide as the capital of Kurdistan.” As a result of this phenomenon within the Kurdish diaspora, an official club store will open in Hanover, Germany, in mid-May.