The women who fought Islamic State
The Kurdish Women’s Defence Units fought in some of the bloodiest battles of Syria’s civil war, says Ben Macintyre. Now their story will be told in a new TV series produced by Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea
For four months the women fought furiously, day and night, to oust the Islamic State militia from the town of Kobane in northern Syria. The Isis troops dug in with tanks, artillery and Humvees. The all-female Kurdish Women’s Defence Units had no such weapons: clad in camouflage green, they fought with old Russian Kalashnikovs, handmade grenades and rudimentary artillery platforms, cobbled from construction vehicles and pick-up trucks. American special forces were awed by their bravery.
Finally, on 26 January 2015, the Isis forces retreated, leaving an estimated 2,000 dead on the battlefield. The women and their male Kurdish comrades-in-arms danced the traditional dabke among their burnt-out tanks.
The siege of Kobane is seen as a turning point in Syria’s civil war, the moment when the religious extremists of the so-called caliphate were stopped in their tracks by a combination of Kurdish forces, their allies and US air strikes. But it was also an unlikely victory for a unique form of feminism. “We can say the Kobane resistance is in particular a women’s resistance,” said Meysa Ebdo, commander of the female fighters. “This resistance also shows us to what extent there has emerged a free Kurdish woman.”
If that sounds like a Hollywood script, then that’s exactly what it is about to become. In January, it was announced that HiddenLight, the production company formed by former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, would be making a TV series depicting the exploits of the female Kurdish fighters. The series will be adapted from a new book by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with members of the Women’s Defence Units (known as the YPJ), the female wing of the People’s Defence Units (YPG) which gained international attention for fighting Isis in Syria. The book is “an extraordinary account of brave, defiant women fighting for justice and equality”, according to Hillary Clinton.
Young Kurdish female fighters have become one of the most distinctive images of the Syrian conflict, pictured frequently in Western newspapers brandishing guns and grinning while engaged in some of the most ferocious battles of the war. The female fighters even feature in the latest version of the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. They fight on two fronts: on the battlefield and in the arena of public relations. In her book, Lemmon depicts a “plucky ragtag militia” with an
“all-female command structure” that swiftly earned male respect with their discipline and courage. As one US officer noted: “The men have no issue with them at all. It’s almost bizarre.” The war correspondent Anthony Loyd has described the YPJ as “probably the world’s most experienced women’s frontline force”. The American writer and activist Meredith Tax has hailed them as “kick-ass socialist feminists... tough enough to beat Isis”.
Quite apart from their military prowess, the fighters represent a revolution in genderrelations in the region, a reversal of centuries of male dominance. There have been female warriors throughout history, but the YPJ are the first to fight equipped with an explicit feminist ideology: when they go into battle they are also fighting for women’s rights. “We are not just fighting for feminism, we are fighting mainly to protect our people and our land,” Tolveen Van, a 20-year-old Kurdish woman told The Times. “But fighting is also part of true equality, and as women we are proud to fight an enemy like the Daesh [Isis] – men who like their women as housewives, stuck in the kitchen, cleaning dishes.”
“As women we are proud to fight an enemy like Isis – men who like their women stuck in the kitchen, cleaning dishes”
But in Middle Eastern politics there are few one-dimensional heroes or heroines. The YPJ are brave and disciplined. They are also controversial and intensely divisive, another explosive element in the complex and bloody politics of the region. Some question whether the YPJ are quite the battlehardened combat troops they appear to be for the cameras, while others point out that Kurdish society in general remains intensely patriarchal.
The all-female YPJ and the male YPG are militias that form the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an umbrella of allied groups that make up the armed forces of Rojava, the de facto autonomous, majority-Kurdish region of northeastern Syria. At first, women were part of the mixed-sex Kurdish volunteer militia, but the first female unit was formed in 2013. Since then, it has expanded to number as many as 24,000 fighters, not only Kurds but also women from other ethnic groups and foreign volunteers.
As well as clashes with Isis, the female unit has been involved in fighting the forces of the al-Nusra Front, affiliated with al-Qa’eda, and the Syrian government. In addition to victory at Kobane, the YPJ played an important part in the offensives against Isis strongholds in Tabqa and Raqqa. In August 2014, Isis killed and abducted thousands of Yazidi people in northern Iraq in a genocidal operation against a group they saw as “Devil
worshippers”. Thousands of Yazidis fled to the mountains to escape, including many women, children and the elderly, without shelter or food. The female Kurdish fighters formed part of the attacking force that opened up a 20-mile corridor with the help of US air strikes and the SAS to enable the Yazidis to escape. At least 35,000 were able to reach Syria.
However, while the US turned to the Kurds as allies in the fight against Isis, Turkey’s President Erdogan considers them to be terrorists associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which both Turkey and the US regard as a terrorist organisation. In a press release issued on the sixth anniversary of the liberation of Kobane, Hillary Clinton described the female fighters in heroic terms: “We created HiddenLight to celebrate heroes – sung and unsung alike – whose courage is too often overlooked.” That description has enraged parts of the Turkish press, which accused Clinton of trying to “whitewash the PKK”.
The Clintons have had an ambivalent relationship with the Kurds. It was Bill Clinton’s administration that designated the PKK a terrorist organisation (though the designation does not apply to the YPJ). At the start of the war in Syria, Hillary Clinton joined Turkey in expressing concern the country could become a PKK haven. By 2016, she was more supportive of the Kurdish militias, including the YPJ. “I would consider arming the Kurds,” she said in a debate with her presidential rival Donald Trump. “The Kurds have been our best partners in Syria, as well as Iraq.”
“Some Isis jihadists are said to be particularly fearful of death at the hands of a woman since this would be a dishonour”
In 2018 the Turkish armed forces launched Operation Olive Branch, a cross-border operation into the Afrin district of Rojava. Among those killed in the fighting was Anna Campbell, 26, a British volunteer in the YPJ, fighting under the nom de guerre Hêlîn Qereçox. A feminist, anarchist and political activist from East Sussex, Campbell had been drawn to the YPJ by their advocacy of equal rights for women, and was determined to participate in what she described as the “revolution of women” in “the weaponised fight against fascism”. She is believed to have been killed by a Turkish missile. After her death, the YPJ put out a statement: “Our British comrade Hêlîn Qereçox has become the symbol of all women after resisting against fascism in Afrin to create a free world. We promise to fulfil Şehîd [Martyr] Hêlîn’s struggle and honour her memory in our fight for freedom.”
Coverage of the YPJ in the West has tended to focus on their fighters’ looks more than their ideology. As well as physical and military training, recruits are required to undertake rigorous political study, principally the libertarian socialist philosophy of the Kurdish nationalist Abdullah Öcalan, a founding member of the PKK. Öcalan has spent the past 22 years in a Turkish prison after being abducted in Nairobi in 1999 by Turkish intelligence officers working with US assistance (during Bill Clinton’s presidency). In prison, he abandoned his belief in old-fashioned Marxism-Leninism in favour of “democratic confederalism”, a political ideology opposed to the capitalist nation-state, and based on ideas of ecology, cultural pluralism and shared economy.
He also developed a new brand of feminism known as jineology (literally, the “science of women”), which rejected the maledominated, tribal, honour-based rules of traditional Kurdish society, advocating instead complete gender equality. “The level of women’s freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society,” Öcalan wrote. “The need to reverse the role of man is of revolutionary importance.” Öcalan’s radical feminist philosophy is a central tenet of the Rojava administration, where child marriage and polygamy have been abolished and women have equal right to divorce. Yet, as a whole, women are still subordinate in Kurdish society, which remains intensely patriarchal, with the highest rates of honour killing and female genital mutilation in the region.
Jineology is the guiding philosophy behind the all-woman Kurdish forces, and YPJ fighters hold Öcalan in almost cult-like reverence. As part of their training, new recruits are encouraged to read a range of modern feminist literature. Erin Trieb, a photographer who has documented the YPJ, described it as “a feminist movement, even if that is not their main mission”.
This reversal of gender roles has a direct impact on the nature of the conflict. Some Isis jihadists are said to be particularly fearful of death at the hands of a woman since this would be a dishonour, barring a martyr’s entry to paradise. Kurdish propaganda has deliberately played on those fears. Conversely, dead women soldiers are also seen as grim propaganda opportunities by their enemies. During the battle for Kobane, an image was circulated of a grinning Isis killer holding aloft the head of a female Kurdish fighter. As women undermining male dominance, the female warriors are likely to face rape if captured; knowing this, many say they would rather commit suicide and take some of their enemies with them. Suicide bombing is part of the YPJ military mentality. How many YPJ troops have died in combat is unknown, since the unit refuses to release casualty figures.
The all-female unit has also been accused of recruiting girls as young as 12 to fight in its ranks. In 2019, the defence forces of Rojava signed up to a UN plan to end the use of “child soldiers” – but Human Rights Watch has continued to document cases of under-18s fighting with the Kurdish militias. Many of these girls are recruited from camps in northeast Syria, and some are said to be fleeing forced marriages or violent domestic situations. The YPJ insists that girls under 18 are educated in special academies and are not directly involved in military activities.
Screen drama tends to flatten convoluted politics and, as in the past, well-meaning Americans may be plunging into a more tangled and perilous story than many realise. As described by the Clintons, the female warriors of Kobane are simply heroines battling the forces of Islamic extremism, confronting centuries of sexism and advancing the frontiers of feminism, guns in hand. And so they are. But the YPJ is much more, and much more interesting than that. These women are part of a complex and evolving political-sexual landscape, inflicting and facing brutal violence, followers of a radical leftist ideologue representing an organisation seen as terrorist by Turkey and the US.
The Clintons, mother and daughter, will be telling the story of women who follow the teachings of a man her husband helped to imprison. The TV series may encourage other Western women to join the ranks of the YPJ; some, like Anna Campbell, may die on the battlefield. The women of the YPJ are not just fighters in the conflict between the Kurds and their enemies: they are part of a wider propaganda battle and a war between the sexes. Hillary Clinton ceased to be US secretary of state in 2013. In espousing the story of the daughters of Kobane, she will find herself embroiled once again in the complex politics of the Middle East.
A longer version of this article appeared in The Times. © Times Newspapers Limited 2021.