by MELIS
Kurdish Peshmerga female fighters take part in combat skills training before deploying to fight the Islamic State at their military camp in Sulaimaniya, northern Iraq in September last year PHOTO/Daily Mail
Rojava, the newly autonomous Kurdish region in Syria, became a household name in the summer of 2014, during the war between the Islamic State and the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) and YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) forces. At the same time, photos of the all-female YPJ units began appearing all over Western media, pitting the Kurds as a feminist alternative to other forces in the region. These media sources were not wrong when they called the revolution in Rojava a feminist revolution, however they often failed to go beyond images of female soldiers in understanding what feminism means for Rojava.
Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is the man behind the model of democratic confederalism, which forms the basis of the governing model in Rojava. Claiming that the history of civilization is a “5000-year-old history… of the enslavement of woman”, Ocalan argues that “the depth of woman’s enslavement and the intentional masking of this fact is thus closely linked to the rise within society of hierarchical and statist power.”
Framing women’s liberation in this way inextricably links it with anti-statist struggles. Abandoning the gender roles that have been ascribed to men and women, what Ocalan calls a “total divorce” of the 5000-year history of civilization, goes hand in hand with the revolution that is happening in Rojava. Ocalan came up with the “total divorce theory” in 1997, however women had already begun taking up more space within the Kurdish liberation movement before then.
Within the PKK, which was founded in 1976, women began playing an important role in guerilla fighting in the early 1990s. In 1992, a woman called Beri?tan sacrificed herself in warfare rather than surrender to the enemy, thus becoming a role model for many Kurdish women fighters and an important symbol for the Kurdish women’s movement. The first women’s congress was held on March 8th 1995, and by 1999 there was a separate women’s wing of the PKK. The formation of separate women’s guerilla forces in the PKK can be seen as the precedent of the all-female armed forces of Rojava, the YPJ.
YPJ
Talking about the reason behind forming an all-female military unit, YPJ commander Zozan Deniz said, “in contexts where women and men were together, women had this understanding that men would take care of things. We had to change that attitude, which is where the YPJ came in.” Despite the importance of the YPJ, not all armed units in Rojava are gender segregated. Anyone can join the YPG, regardless of gender identity.
The YPJ creates a space for women to challenge internalized feelings of incompetency projected on them by society, away from the scrutiny of men. Deniz continued to say that at the beginning of the revolution, even the fact that women were driving the vans of the YPJ created a lot of excitement, as it was seen as a sign of women joining the public sphere.
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