Today is the first day of Women’s History Month. Given that I am the very proud father of a strong young woman who will be graduating from NYU in May, I wanted to use this post to pay tribute to all women and their ongoing fight for true equality. Over the weekend I finished a book entitled, The Daughters of Kobani,1 which is a book about the YPJ (Kurdish Women’s Protective Unit) which is an all-female fighting force that played a key role in the defeat of ISIS in Syria. If anyone ever doubted the ability of female soldiers, I suggest they read this book. I, for one, would hate to be on the opposite side of a battlefield facing this formidable force. Hundreds of ISIS soldiers paid the price with their lives for underestimating these women.
This book is not just about women at war, but is also an account of women striving for women’s rights and to be treated as equals in a land where women’s equality was a radical concept. Women’s equality was an even more radical concept in Middle Eastern countries than in the US and many ‘Western’ cultures. (Even though women are still fighting for equality in the US today, but more on that later.)
As you may recall, ISIS was particularly brutal toward women. When they swept in and conquered towns and villages, the women who weren’t killed, were taken prisoner and used as sex slaves, often passed around from soldier to soldier. They were brutalized. There is no other word for it. When ISIS began advancing on the Syrian town of Kobani, which was essentially controlled by the Kurds, many Kurdish women decided to join the fight. These women had been told by their families that they could not pursue higher education. They were told who they were going to marry. They had little control over their own lives and their own destinies. But in Kobani, many of them decided to take a stand not only against ISIS but as a way to prove themselves equal to their male counterparts and to gain control of their lives. They initially had to plead for training and many joined the YPJ against the wishes of their families. But it gave them a purpose and a modicum of control over their lives. In the end, they became a formidable fighting force showing every bit as much courage and grit and lethality as their male counterparts.
The defense and defeat of ISIS in the town of Kobani was one of the first defeats suffered by ISIS and it could not have been possible without the YPJ and I suspect there are few, if any, male members of the Kurdish military (later morphed into the Syrian Defense Force) who would argue with that statement. These women fought valiantly and many of the young women died, but they were key to defending Kobani from an ISIS assault.
After the YPJ helped to defeat ISIS in Kobani, the force continued to grow and become more battle hardened. In a subsequent key battle, the YPJ would lead the Syrian Defense Forces in a nighttime crossing of the Euphrates river in an assault on the ISIS stronghold of Manbij, which ISIS had held for 2 ½ years. The assault and ensuing battles were grueling and costly but ultimately successful, in no small part due to the YPJ. The YPG (People’s Protection Unit) was the all-male counter-part of the YPJ but there is no doubt that the men in the YPG had great respect for the members of the YPJ and viewed them as true equals on the battlefield. And, in fact, as the war dragged on year after year, some of the top commanders were female and they commanded thousands of soldiers, both men and women.
As the war dragged on, the women of the YPJ were focused on the day-to-day task of surviving and defeating ISIS but when it was clear that ISIS was facing defeat and the ouster from their ‘capital’ Raqqa was at hand, the leaders of the YPJ began to turn their attention more towards ensuring the equality they had gained in the war, would not be lost when civilian rule returned. Given the respect they had earned in the war, they were given a ‘seat at the table’ as the new self-rule government was being formulated. They pushed for and insisted that equality for women be enshrined in those documents and they were. They fought a war against ISIS and they fought a war to establish equality for women – they won them both, but at a huge cost. Unfortunately, the fight continues. Not against ISIS but against newer adversaries.
Reading this book was even more gut wrenching when you look at the sacrifices all of these Kurdish soldiers made, male and female, to help the US defeat ISIS only to have the United States pull the rug out from under them when ISIS was defeated in deference to Turkey who views the Kurds as enemies. In my opinion, it was one of the worst and most shameful foreign policy decisions to come out of the Trump administration. It is hard to imagine how you could abandon people that sacrificed so much on your behalf. Politics is an ugly business.
It is hard to know what the future of the Kurdish people is but I hope that they will eventually find peace and are able to establish an area of self-rule where the equality that the members of the YPJ fought so hard and so valiantly for can serve as a model for, not only other Middle Eastern countries, but countries around the world. Sadly, even here in the US, the Equal Rights Amendment to enshrine women’s equality in the US Constitution, that was originally passed in 1972, has still not been ratified. Maybe some day the world will mature enough to recognize that women are the true equals of men. And if anyone has any doubts, I suggest they read this book.
- The Daughters of Kobani, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Penguin Press, 2021