Meredith Tax - A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State

PRAISE FOR

A Road Unforeseen

An indefatigable political thinker and activist takes us on a forensic journey into the gendering of geopolitical conflict and resistance.

Beatrix Campbell, author of Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy and End of Equality: The Only Way Is Womens Liberation

This book lifts the lid on one of the best-kept secrets of our times, the birth of a revolution in the Middle East driven by gender equality and direct democracy. Meredith Tax makes a well-researched, cogent, and passionate case for why we should all get behind this experiment, at once fragile and gutsy, in Rojava, northern Syria, and Turkey.

Rahila Gupta, author of Provoked and Enslaved

At last we have a book that tells us what we crave to know each day as we open the newspaper to read about IS, Islamists, shifting alliances, enslaved women, fleeing immigrants, and shocking cruelties. Meredith Tax shows us how the Kurds of Rojava are trying to put in place a system of equality between men and women and take local, democratic control of their lives, which would be remarkable anywhere, let alone in a war zone. As Tax so clearly demonstrates here, putting women at the center of a struggle for freedom changes everything. Its time to learn about the extraordinary Rojava and the hope it offers that another world is possible.

Ann Snitow, author of The Feminism of Uncertainty

Meredith Tax tells the tangled and amazing history of Kurdish politicsfrom family feuds to terrorism to radical democracy and feminismwith just the right mixture of admiration and concern.

Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars and The Paradox of Liberation

Also by Meredith Tax

NONFICTION

The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict 18801917

Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights

FICTION

Rivington Street

Union Square

First published in the United States in 2016 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

For information, contact:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV A612

New York, NY 10016

2016 by Meredith Tax

Photographs 2015 by Joey L.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donorsindividuals and foundationsfor their support.

The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

First Edition

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-11-5

To Myra Malkin,

My steadfast friend and support for over fifty years

We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen.

There lies our hope, if hope it be.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Table of Contents

Contents

GEOGRAPHY OF KURDISTAN

Iran = East Kurdistan/Rojhilat

Iraq = South Kurdistan/Bashur

Syria = West Kurdistan/Rojava

Turkey = North Kurdistan/Bakur

IRAQI KURDISH PARTIES

KRG: Kurdistan Regional Government (coalition)

KDP: Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Masoud Barzani

PUK: Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani

Gorran (Movement for Change): third party breakaway from PUK in 2009

THE KURDISH LIBERATION MOVEMENT (PKK) NETWORK

KCK: Association of Communities in Kurdistan

KJK: Kurdistan Womens Liberation Movement

PJAK: Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (Iran)

YRK-HPJ: Eastern Kurdistan Protection Units and Womens Protection Units

PYD: Democratic Union Party (Syria)

YPG-YPJ: Peoples Protection Units and Womens Protection Units (Syria)

TEV-DEM (multi-party civil society coalition)

PKK: Kurdistan Workers Party (Turkey)

TAJK: Free Womens Movement of Kurdistan

HPG-YJA-Star: Peoples Defense Forces and Free Womens Forces

YDG-H and YDG-K: Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement and Union of Patriotic Revolutionary Young Women

DTK: Democratic Society Congress (multi-party civil society coalition)

GENEALOGY OF KURDISH PARLIAMENTARY PARTIES IN TURKEY

HEP 19901993

DEP 19931994

HADEP 19942003

DEHAP 20032006, merged with another Kurdish party to form the DTP

DTP Democratic Society Party 20062009

BDP Successor party to DTP 20082014, merged with HDP

HDP Kurdish and Gezi feminist-LGBT-Left Party, 2014present

AL QAEDA AND DAESH

Al Qaeda in Iraq (IQI) is founded 2002

Changes name to Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) 2006

Sends infiltrators into Syria 2011 who found Jabhat al-Nusra

ISI announces merger with Jabhat al-Nusra 2013 under a name translated either as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Iraq and al-Sham) or ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant)

Jabhat al-Nusra refuses to merge so al Qaeda and ISIS split 2013

ISIS declares itself a caliphate under the name Islamic State (IS) 2014

Daesh is the Arabic name for Islamic State, used by its opponents

Didar, a soldier with the Womens Protection Units (YPJ).

I N AUGUST 2014, DAESHthe Arabic acronym for the terrorist group that has been variously called ISIS, ISIL, and the Islamic Stateattacked the city of Kobane in Northern Syria, and I started seeing pictures of smiling rifle-toting girls in uniform defending the city. Who were these girls? After hours of searching the web, I realized that they belonged to a revolutionary organization of which I had never heard, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of the Syrian Kurds, which had liberated three areas, Cizire, Afrin, and Kobane, on the Syria-Turkey border, setting up cantons where people make decisions through local councils and women hold 40 percent of all leadership positions. As an entity, the cantons are called Rojava.