Gayle Tzemach Lemmon - The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice

syrian characters

Nowruz: Womens Protection Units commander

Rojda: Womens Protection Units member

Azeema: Womens Protection Units member

Znarin: Womens Protection Units member

Mazlum Abdi: Head of the Peoples Protection Units, later head of the Syrian Democratic Forces

Ilham Ahmed: Copresident of the Syrian Democratic Council

Fauzia Yusuf: Political leader

american characters

Mitch Harper: U.S. Special Operations

Leo James: U.S. Special Operations

Brady Fox: U.S. Special Operations

Jason Akin: U.S. Special Operations

Brett McGurk: Special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS

Amb. William Roebuck: Senior adviser to Special Presidential Envoy Brett McGurk; deputy special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS

I made the trip to the Iraqi-Syrian border with some reluctance. I told myself that I had given up warat least for a bit. I felt deeply guilty that I enjoyed the luxury of making that choice while so many I had met in the past decade and a half did not, but I was homebound and determined to stay that way.

I had spent years telling stories from and about war. My first book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, introduced readers to a teenage girl whose living-room business supported her family and families around her neighborhood under the Taliban. During years of desperation, it created hope. I came to love Afghanistanthe strength and resilience and courage that I saw all around me and that rarely reached Americans back home. I wanted readers to know the young women I met who risked their lives each day fighting for their future.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana led to my next story, Ashleys War, about a team of young soldiers recruited for an all-female special operations team at a time when women were officially banned from ground combat. That book changed me, just as the first book had. Once more, the upheaval of war created openings for women. I felt personally responsible for bringing this history to as many readers as I could, given the grit and the heart of the women I met in the reporting process and their valor on the battlefield in Afghanistan.

The post-9/11 conflicts had come to shape my life: I got married only a few days before heading to Afghanistan for the first round of research for Dressmaker. I found out I was pregnant with my first child while in Afghanistan two years later, when I was finishing the book. For Ashleys War, I spent years not long after my second pregnancy immersed in the workings of the special operations community, and I was in constant touch with a Gold Star family forever changed by their daughters deployment. They taught me what Memorial Day actually means.

I felt deeply proud of the work. And I also felt emotionally spent, trying to make Americans care about faraway places and people that meant so much to me personally. I was tired of living two lives, the one at home and the one immersed in war, and I thought often of that moment in the film The Hurt Locker when you return full of fervor to persuade Americans to care about their conflicts and then wind up in the grocery store, looking at stacks of cereal boxes on the shelf, and realize no one back home even remembers these wars remain under way.

I would recharge for a bit, I decided. Tell a story about the community of single moms who raised me.

And then I received a phone call that changed everything.

Gayle, you have to see whats happening here. Im not jokingits unbelievable, Cassie said when I picked up her call from a number I did not recognize one afternoon in early 2016. She was a member of an Army special operations team deployed to northeastern Syria, where U.S.-backed forces were fighting the extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. This was her third deployment. She had served in Iraq in 2010 as a military police officer. Then she signed up to go to Afghanistan in 2011 as part of the Cultural Support Teams, serving alongside the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment; she belonged to the all-womens team I chronicled in