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How Women Militiamen Fight in Syrian Kurdistan

2021-09-04T21:32:47.683Z


They are anti patriarchal and environmentalists. They are at war with the Islamic State for autonomy. Writer Magda Tagtachian has just published 'Rojava', a novel based on her heroism.


Magda Tagtachian

09/04/2021 7:00

  • Clarín.com

  • Live

Updated 09/04/2021 12:27 PM

Jin, jiya, azadi

! Shout the women in

Rojava

, the combatants in military

jackets

with braided hair and flowers.

They are the militia women who cry out for women, life and freedom.

They are the pillars of the weft that symbolizes your hairstyle.

But also the backbones on which they built and build their struggle and resistance.

Rojava

, which means "west" in Kurdish

, refers to Syrian Kurdistan (there is also Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish). However, in

Rojava,

the Kurds have organized in a particular way. They created the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, based on three key axes: a horizontal government system (“democratic confederalism”), gender equality and

ecology as a means of sustenance.

The Kurdish people,

a stateless nation

with some 40 million people in the world, is one of the oldest. It was established in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the cradle of humanity.

Faced with the continuous threats from the regional powers,

since 2012 the popular female and male militias have been operating

in

Rojava

.

Those made up of women have grown in number

since the Islamic State tried to dominate this portion of the map with the institution of the Caliphate.

Organized in "Academies", volunteers join the YPJ (Female Protection Units) and YPG (Male Protection Units)

to resist the threat of the Turkish regime of Recip Erdogan and the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad

in collusion with Islamic fundamentalists .

In 2014, the first photos in the media of female fighters immediately caught my attention.

They called them "the avengers of the Islamic State."

They gained fame for repelling the jihadists who took them, their sisters, nieces, cousins, and murdered their mothers, grandmothers, fathers and older brothers as sex slaves.

It happened during the Sinjair genocide (not yet recognized by the UN) in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Islamic State attacked the Yazidi families of Kocho, a neighboring village inhabited by Yazidis (first cousins ​​of the Kurds, in terms of ethnicity).

Minor males were taken prisoner and forced to convert to Islam.

Those who did not obey were shot. The terrorists seized several cities in Iraq and Syria to establish the Caliphate,

but when they wanted to enter Kobane, Rojava, the women organized

in these militias to resist and repel them. They detonated each other with their hair down, causing terror to fear

.

For Islamic State, Yazidi women represent the Devil.

They believe that dying at their hands means going to Hell.

"The female fighters immediately caught my attention. They were called 'the avengers of the Islamic State'. They gained fame for repelling the jihadists who took them as sex slaves."


Magda Tagtachian

The battle of Kobane (September 2014 / January 2015) was heroic but it was also feminine and feminist.

The combatants did this by opening fire in the front with outlined eyes

, painted mouths, and enameled nails.

They wielded their AK-47 rifles, Kalashnicov, the characteristic weapon of the area;

and they fired with precision cannons and mortars.

The AK 47 is the weapon worn by the woman with a military jacket and hair braided with flowers on the cover of my novel

Rojava

(2021, Penguin Argentina).

The protagonist of my fiction, Nané Parsehyan, an Armenian raised in Soviet Armenia who travels to Rojava in search of her real father, worked as an argument for me to

retrace the history of the Kurdish

and Yazidi people, to

understand the complex Syrian plot

and to continue retracing my own path to the origin, the Armenian.

I studied the organization of Rojava from the sociological, political, cultural and ideological. They follow the principles of Abdullah Öcalan, their leader, a Kurdish revolutionary born in Turkey, imprisoned and isolated in the Sea of ​​Marmara twenty years ago. Europeans and Americans travel to study the Rojava model, although it is much less known here.

In

Rojava,

the fight against the ancestral patriarchy is not only fought in arms and military training.

They teach it in classes taught by their leaders. They have to do with the cry of freedom: jin, jiyan, hoe. The horizontal government system establishes the election of a female leader and a male leader for each canton of Rojava; gender equality where sexual choice is respected; and the construction of a society with ecological sustenance, key not only for the durability of the planet but also as resistance to capitalist oppression.

Whoever dominates the natural resources, dominates the peoples.

In

Rojava

they know this because Erdogan diverted the Euphrates river to cut off their resources.

The community was not passive.

It organized different programs to recover the land devastated by the Turkish bombings that continue today, the

exploitation of natural resources and the drought characteristic of the area.

Women's militias have been operating in Rojava since 2012.

Photo: AFP

One of the

Make Rojava Green Again

plans

(makerojavagreenagain.org) brings together world experts and scientists to collaborate on green projects.

In this way, they began the construction of nurseries, community gardens, engineering to filter and reuse contaminated water and promote reforestation.

No choice

In this area,

the patriarchy has been ingrained for centuries.

Arabs, Kurds, Armenians or Yazidis (as soon as they finish school) must marry, become mothers and serve the husband. Some are engaged for the wedding before graduating to college. And of course they don't have a choice. Their parents or grandparents do it for them.

To be a woman, and to be a young woman, in this culture, is to annul oneself as an individual

.

While

the Syrian regime has stated that it will never give

Rojava

autonomy

, the Kurds in the region have already asked the UN to recognize them as an autonomous region.

While the lanes of politics and negotiations between states and international organizations continue their course, sometimes too slow, the women of

Rojava

do not rest.

They cannot lose a day of their lives that they dedicate to defend their land.

The men accompany them

.

They neither compete nor dominate them.

The struggle is constituted above gender, ethnicity and religion.

Other dramas

There are still three

thousand captives of the Islamic State

who remain in Arab houses in Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

The so-called "coyotes" pose as Arabs and look for them in exchange for stark sums that their desperate families "pay".

"Captives do not always suffer the same fate. If the coyotes manage to find them, another journey begins to 'return' them. First, through the minefields and then the most chilling part of the patriarchy."


Magda Tagtachian

Captives do not always suffer the same fate.

If the coyotes manage to find them, another journey begins to "return" them.

First, through the minefields (there is still the ammunition laid by the jihadists in their retreat after the fall of the Caliphate), and then the most chilling part of the patriarchy.

Their own families reject them because these

women return "with their honor stained

.

"

They are no longer virgins and their fathers and mothers do not consider them worthy to return home.

Many take refuge in the city of Jinwar, the city of women, created in

Rojava

for those who have suffered the violence of the patriarchy.

Here they can live and develop with their children, but they must leave the place when they reach the age of majority.

The other issue that brings violence to the region is that many Kurds and Yazidis have no choice but to go live, or subsist, in refugee camps.

One of the largest in Syria is Al-Hol.

This like the others, are "not places" that generate more humanitarian crisis.

The participation of international organizations is never enough.

Refugees have spent years living in tents or containers covered in dust

- and mud when it floods - in precarious sanitary conditions, with all the dangers that this implies.

The pandemic worsened the problem even more

.

And of course everyone wants to go home.

Although many, most do not have the guarantee or the means to do so.

Fright where you look.

Not only do Yazidi or Kurdish women rescued from the Islamic State live in the refugee camps, but also the women of the jihadists.

Rojava, Magda Tagtachian's new novel, reflects the struggle of Kurdish female soldiers.

Some fled from the beasts and others have ended up in the fields after their husbands were killed in combat or immolated themselves.

And here the other paradox and horror.

Many are repentant

and lament for having been "co-opted" with the false promises of the jihadists and having suffered subjugation and rape. Besides not being able to see how their husbands took Yazidi women home and asked the other wives to prepare them to rape them and then they had to take care of and feed them. They were kept locked in rooms to abuse them, even in droves.

At the other extreme, the women who came to the same camps after the terrorist leaders were killed continue to yearn for the regrouping of the Islamic State.

They receive orders from clandestine cells still active.

They order them under their breath: "wait in the fields until we give you the instructions to return."

Like the "repentants", they traveled to the "Caliphate" from Europe (generally in crisis with their families) to marry the jihadists.

The "repentant" women cannot return to their countries of origin

where they will be accused of complicity with international terrorism and are awaited to imprison them.

The problem is as delicate as it is complex.

In the fields, "a marginal world within another marginal world" functions.

Meanwhile, and despite the continuous threats from regional powers and the pivoting of international ones,

Rojava

continues to beat as a new model of society.

Every morning they show that you can be reborn from the ashes with courage, ingenuity and organization. And the main data, a vintage brand, women are the protagonists.

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-09-04

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