Today, on International Women’s Day, I think especially of the young Kurdish female soldiers whose efforts were decisive when the Islamic State, ISIS, the world’s most misogynistic terrorist army, was defeated in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and in Syria. Some of those in these pictures are dead today. The same Western world that applauded the bloody fight of the Syrian Kurds and their multiethnic and multireligious allies against ISIS then betrayed its allies and let Turkey invade Rojava. Betrayal and broken promises have been the fate of my people throughout history. World powers that have called us friends while we fought and died have ultimately still made dirty deals with the same governments and movements they wanted us to fight. In 2014 and 2015, I visited Rojava several times. On one of the trips, I was joined by
@neideman Magnus Hjalmarson Neideman, it is his photos you see (except for pictures 5,6). Below is a brief summary of one of the texts we published:
”Aryen Guneş, the group commander of the Syrian Kurdish women’s defense force YPJ, did not tremble in her voice when she spoke about the fight against ISIS and about the nature of war. About scraping the remains of shattered friends. About holding dying 18, 19-year-old girls in her arms and whispering over and over again ”it will be fine”, about severed heads, dismembered children’s bodies, mass graves and sex slaves. One evening in late March 2015, when I sat with Aryen Guneş and five soldiers between 18 and 23 a kilometer from ISIS forces, she said:
- The traditional image of the woman in war has been the one who is raped or flees with children in tow towards an unknown horizon, the one who must provide food, sleep, healthcare and comfort... Not only war, but throughout history, war lacks a female face.
Since war has always been a man, the hero cannot be a woman. We have been prisoners in the male conceptions of war. In the male words. Man is the yardstick when history is written, nations are created, oppression is fought, freedom is won, when heroes and leaders, songs, poems, myths, literature and new culture are born. (Rest of the text is in the commentary) #rojava #feminism #war #photo
