'Women, Life, Freedom' - the fight for women's rights in Rojava

Essential reading from Natasha Walter in North East Syria

Natasha Walter has just visited North East Syria and has written this account in The Guardian. Given its importance at this moment when so much is at stake for the future of Syria, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me pasting the text here too. It’s an essential account of the fight for women’s rights in the region, Rojava:

‘Woman, life, freedom’: the Syrian feminists who forged a new world in a land of war

Natasha Walter

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‘Being a woman,” says the woman standing on the stage in front of me, “doesn’t mean I am just here to raise children. Being a woman means that I am here to write history. Women can speak. We can sing. Nobody will silence us.” There is a roar of approval around me.

I’m sitting in a huge conference hall in Hasakah, a city in north-east Syria. The woman on the stage, a singer called Mizgîn Tahir, has bobbed curly hair and wears boots and a skirt, while the women around me are dressed in varied styles – some in floor-length Kurdish dresses with sparkling embroidery, others with headscarves and plain coats, others sporting Yazidi headdresses with hanging beads. All are cheering. Tahir has now finished her speech and is about to return to her chair, but the women in the hall won’t let her. “Sing for us!” they call. “Sing!”

She goes back, lifts the microphone and sings, her rich voice flowing through the audience. When she has finished, the hall of women rise to their feet to chant “jin jiyan azadi” (“woman, life, freedom”) with their right hands raised in a peace sign.

I’ve come to this conference hall on my second day in north-east Syria, an area known as Rojava. My journey here took me from Iraqi Kurdistan across the Tigris river, where white egrets tread the slow water, and then into the bleak landscape that is northern Syria in winter. Here, treeless fields stretch out into the distance, the air is smoky with burning oil and armed men at checkpoints scrutinise you every few miles. So I feel warmed and energised to find myself among so many determined, passionate women.

Across the world, people watched Syrians celebrate the fall of the brutal Assad regime. They celebrated in Rojava too, delighted to see the end of a government that had brought so much suffering. Here too, statues were toppled and people took to the streets, while others prayed for the return of loved ones who had disappeared into prison cells. But the situation in Rojava is not the same as in the rest of the country. For a start, the regime had already retreated here. Back in 2012, when uprisings were being brutally crushed elsewhere in Syria, a rebellion led by Kurds took over most of this area. They were able to set up their own administration, now known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Daanes.

This administration has faced constant challenges. Islamic State wreaked mayhem across the region from 2014 to 2019 and thousands of IS prisoners, including the UK’s Shamima Begum, are still held in crowded prison camps here. The Turkish government – which accuses the administration of being allied to the PKK, the militant Kurdish group that operates in eastern Turkey – has never stopped attacking it, now occupies areas of northern Syria and has recently stepped up airstrikes and assaults via local militias. Even though the US supported the administration’s fight against IS, nobody in the international community recognises Daanes as a government. But it has kept going for more than 10 years, and not only kept going. Its brave experiments with power sharing and direct democracy have made it a source of intense inspiration for many socialists and feminists.

I’m here right now to try to understand more about these experiments, because I’m currently writing a book which tussles with the question: what kind of feminism do we need now? In a world of growing misogyny, conflict and environmental breakdown, where are women still coming together, despite all the odds, in the hope of creating a better world? How are they going about it? And what chance of success do they have? While it’s not always easy here to tease out where rhetoric ends and reality begins, one thing I realise right away is that these women are probably the most determined feminists that I have ever met.

“This is a women’s revolution,” says the first speaker at the conference, Rihan Loqo. She represents Kongra Star, the women’s network of Rojava, which is hosting me during my time in the region. She stands smiling and confident in a flowing green and gold dress, her dark hair loose. “This is a historic struggle against all violence, against every oppression,” she says.

The slogan “woman, life, freedom” was coined here in Rojava, but these women’s actions go well beyond a slogan. One day, I go to visit Leyla Saroxan, the co-chair of the administration’s local agriculture and economy committee. Her very job title brings one key advance home to me: the administration’s governing structures are based on strictly equal power-sharing between men and women. It has set up complex networks of committees and councils that work from the level of the neighbourhood to the region, and each of these has a male and female co-chair. In other words, the administration has a claim to being the most equal political structure in the world.

Although she cuts a conservative-looking figure, wearing a beige headscarf, black dress and shiny patent shoes, Saroxan is clearly driven by the progressive ideas that swirl around here. “Most states in the world are built on capitalist principles. The principle we work from here is that of a social economy. We ask, how do you serve social needs, not just how do you make money?” she says pointedly.

As we talk about whether this is possible, a young man comes in and out serving us tea and coffee. The interpreter comments lightly on the gendered roles we are seeing here, and Saroxan laughs. She agrees that it’s important not only that women take up roles that go against the traditional grain, but also that men do the same. She admits that she has often been talked over by the men around her, but that she has done her work and stood her ground.

Her unyielding commitment to women’s rights means that she is eyeing the new rulers in Damascus with great suspicion. She is not alone in this. However much they welcomed the fall of Assad, women here now feel that they are standing on the edge of a precipice. They have no idea whether the new rulers in Damascus will respect the advances they have made, and what the international community will do to undermine or support them.

The group that toppled the Assad regime, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was previously a member of al-Qaida in Iraq. Areas of Syria formerly controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham reported gender segregation and abuses against women and minorities, but now Sharaa and his colleagues are presenting a far more moderate face.

Is Saroxan convinced by this moderate face? No. “We need to be realistic about who this new government is. The army that defeated the regime, all of their leading members were previous gangsters and Islamists.” Other women talk to me with horror about the video that was circulated on social media of the new justice minister overseeing the execution of two women in 2015. And they speak with dread about the close relationship between the new Syrian rulers and the Turkish government.

When I ask Saroxan about her own feelings about religious freedom, she is down-to-earth. “I wear the headscarf, my friend here does not,” she says, gesturing to a colleague who is bareheaded, “but we both work together.” Indeed, when I travel around Hasakah and Qamishli, two of the main cities in the region, I see that most women are bareheaded. In the shops, cafes and university, women are walking with friends or alone, even smoking shisha in cafes or dancing in the street at a demonstration.

On an energetic demonstration against femicide that I join one sunny lunchtime in Qamishli, I get into conversation with a group of women in their early 20s.

I ask one of them, Iman, what she would like women in Britain to know about women here. “That we aren’t going to go backwards,” she says succinctly. “We’ve developed so much. We’ve taken part in war, we do all kinds of work. The new government needs to listen to us.”

This sense of confidence hasn’t come out of nowhere. Women have been consciously building their revolution from the ground up. One day, I visit the mala jin, or “women’s house” in Qamishli. These women’s houses were spaces set up by women to offer support and protection to those facing family violence and civil disputes. The manager here, Bahiya Mourad, is a woman in her sixties with an ever-ready smile. “The first mala jin were set up in 2011,” she says, “when the regime still governed here in Qamishli. One day the regime came to the centre and said, you have to close down. We took sticks and kicked them out.”

At first, when the women’s houses were set up, few women came to them. “At the time,” Mourad says, “we didn’t know our strength. Women were afraid they would face repercussions if they tried to speak out. Perhaps they would lose their children, or they would be punished.”

Over the last 13 years, Mourad feels they have turned that around. She and her colleagues have been going from house to house over these years, building women’s understanding of their rights. She tells me with a touch of humour about an intervention they made in the early days. They had heard about a young woman who was being held prisoner in her brother’s house. She and another older woman knocked at the door of the house and said that they were looking for a place to pray. Once inside, they asked about the young woman, and persuaded her brother to let them help her. They found her a job. “We changed her life, and also the lives of her family. They let us in because they thought: what harm can these old women do? But there is power in women. I’m old, but I’m fierce.”

They tell me that 10 years ago they helped one or two women a month; now that is up to 100. For instance, there are now laws against underage marriage, and if they hear about a girl who is going to be married, they go to persuade the family to think again. They also work with families where boys and girls have fallen in love and want to marry against their parents’ wishes. “And often we end up dancing at their weddings.”

The political transformation here has been spearheaded by Kurdish women whose liberation is tied up with their reclamation of their Kurdish identity. At the conference I am approached by a serious-faced woman, Anahita Sino. As co-chair of the intellectuals’ union, she is curious about what has brought a British writer to north-east Syria. A few days later, I visit her at home, a tranquil flat in Qamishli. We sit on couches around the edges of the room, she and her daughter and husband, and talk about books and freedom. Kurdish culture was so repressed under the Assad regime that she and other Kurdish writers used to write their poems and stories by hand, and hide the papers in their clothes, going house to house to distribute their work. “When we had readings, we would post boys on the roof and the corner to look out for the police, to warn us.”

Sino and her colleagues have now set up a library in a garden where writers and readers can gather. A few days later, I visit this “garden of reading”. Qamishli is a noisy and polluted city, but here there are rosebeds edged with white pebbles, and eucalyptus trees shield us from the road. In the centre are the library and reading room, and a fountain – dry now, due to water shortages – in the shape of a tree and a book. The care that has gone into this garden is palpable. Sino gives me one of her books, telling me it is about love. “Writers cannot work without freedom,” she says. “Even in the west, writers aren’t always free to say what they want. We have to fight for our freedom everywhere.”

But the transformation here does not only encompass Kurdish women. Syria is an incredibly diverse society, in which Armenian, Syriac, Turkmen and other ethnic and religious minorities live side by side with the Arab majority. One Syriac Christian woman I meet, Georgette Barsoum, reminds me that these other minorities were also oppressed by the Assad regime. “Up to the very end, the regime was trying to threaten us. I cannot describe my feeling when the regime fell. The happiness was indescribable: I was like a bird freed from the cage.”

Barsoum is also keen to remind me that Syriac women and others have been participating in and supporting Daanes from the beginning. But it’s still true that for many critics, the shallowness of support for the administration among Arab people in north-east Syria is a key sign of its limitations. There are other issues to concern critics, too. The close tie between the administration’s dominant party, the PYD, and the militant PKK, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by many countries including the UK, is a block on its international acceptance. The PYD’s commitment to freedom of speech and political dissent in practice is often questioned, and accusations of human rights abuses, including ill treatment of IS prisoners, have been levelled at the administration.

Other critics are simply sceptical about whether the administration has gone as far as its rhetoric suggests, and tell me that the liberated vanguard of women has not yet managed to make the widespread cultural changes that are needed. “This women’s revolution works for some women,” one writer I will call Aliya tells me. “But not for most.” She works in the media, where she says her own emancipated lifestyle has led her into conflict with other men and her own family. “The men say they go along with it, but then they end up marrying a young woman with traditional values. You can’t shift society as quickly as they would like.”

At this time of transition, clearly everything – every advance, every failure – is being contested. Still, I’m struck that nobody I meet says that they want the autonomous administration to be separate from the new Syrian government. Everyone I meet says that they want to be part of a Syria where all women and minorities can enjoy their rights. Many women talk about how the administration’s democratic federalism and gender-equal power-sharing could serve as a model for the whole of Syria. But nobody is confident that this can happen, and some are clearly readying for a fight. As Loqo goes on to say at the conference: “We have bought our advances with hundreds of martyrs, and we will fight to defend them.”

This fighting talk is not just rhetorical. Many of us in the west have seen images of the Kurdish female soldiers, with their braided dark hair and Kalashnikovs, who were so instrumental in destroying IS. In 2014, these women’s units, the YPJ, took on the most misogynist force in the world and were credited with turning the tide of battle in the city of Kobanî. The YPJ are now part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the autonomous administration’s army, which is now in fraught negotiations about whether and how it can become part of a new national Syrian army led from Damascus.

What I hadn’t realised until coming here is how these female fighters are so enthusiastically celebrated. Tahir, for instance, who sang to the conference, says with typical passion: “Why can’t anyone silence me? Because the YPJ has my back.” Everywhere I go, there are portraits of fallen female soldiers on the walls. Over and over again at that conference, the chant “jin jiyan azadi” morphs into the more aggressive “şehîd namirin” (“martyrs never die”). One afternoon, I visit the YPJ in their headquarters in Hasakah. I am met by one of their spokeswomen, Ruksen Mohammed, a young woman with a thoughtful air, and other women from the YPJ as well as from the women’s civil defence force. We sit and drink tea together and talk about feminism and war.

Ruksen says that she saw the IS incursions into Rojava as a deliberate attempt to destroy women’s progress: “It was because women were playing this vanguard role in society here that they were sent to attack us.” They are immensely proud of what they did. “We defeated IS not just for us, but for humanity and for the world. We are fighting for a free tomorrow for everyone.”

When I tell them that I recognise their courage, but I can’t get on board with this celebration of militarism, they engage enthusiastically. One woman from the YPJ challenges me on the history of feminism in the UK: “In your country, when they had to, the suffragettes turned to militancy.” Another from the civil defence unit says that they see what they are doing as self-defence. “If women cannot defend themselves, we know the dangers. What happens to them? Look at the women of Afghanistan, of Iran. We don’t take up weapons out of a love of guns, but because we have to.”

Too often, it seems to me, as I hear discussions in the west of what the new Syria will look like, this impassioned feminism is completely overlooked. Maybe it’s too Kurdish. Maybe it’s too militarised. Maybe it’s too socialist. Maybe it’s just too unlikely. Maybe what western onlookers want when they think about feminism in the Middle East is something more polite, less determined, less angry? But every single day I’m in north-east Syria, whether I visit a university or a justice council, an ecology academy or a demonstration, I feel my breath taken away by the depth of commitment that women show to what they have created here. As the US feminist Robin Morgan once said: “You can fake an orgasm, but you can’t fake a movement.” Whether the women of north-east Syria are talking to me about Mesopotamian goddesses or Rosa Luxemburg, their hatred of the Turkish occupation or their love of freedom, their irreducible desire to defend their rights rings out loud and clear.

Another afternoon, I travel a couple of hours from Qamishli to Jinwar. Set up as a kind of refuge, this is a village where only women live. It is now home to about 20 households of women and children. They include a Yazidi woman who survived the genocide and lives here with her child, as well as other women who need the solidarity of this unique place. The small houses each have a garden, and the women work in their own areas, growing herbs and vegetables, and also contribute to village enterprises including baking bread and traditional herbal medicine. I walk through the village in the afternoon light, breathing a softer air. On the wall of the bakery building is a drawing of Nisaba, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of both writing and grain. Over and over again in the conversations I have had with women here they have talked about the inspiration they gain from the idea that before there was patriarchy in this region there were ancient egalitarian societies in which women shared power with men. Here, they have tried to embody those traditions in a new form. I climb the steps to the roof of one of the houses.

Standing on this roof, the village looks small, almost lost in the plain that stretches out to the Turkish border. On one side of the village is a grove of pomegranate and olive trees, with finches chirping among their branches; in another field a few cows and sheep graze. In this devastated land, it feels like a place of hope. Below me, women and children are gathering around a little fire; they are toasting nuts and seeds and laughing in the late afternoon light. Here, women of different faiths and experiences can share the care of their children and the land and themselves. Their laughter mingles and rises in the cold air.

I remember the words of one of the few Arab women who spoke at the conference on my second day here. Shahrazad al-Jassem from Zenobiya, the Arab women’s gathering of north and east Syria, spoke with a weighty certainty as she said: “We will not step back, we will not lose our rights, we will build a Syria based on women’s rights, we have lit a new flame.” In this soft golden light I listen to the laughter of the women below me, and hope with all my heart that the flame they have lit can persist.