Meredith Tax on Yazidi and Kurdish women militias: When Women Fight ISIS
Two years ago this
month, the Islamic State attacked the
Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority who live around Sinjar Mountain in Iraq. The militants came down
on unprotected villages like Byron’s wolf on the fold, slaughtering the men and
taking away thousands of women and children to
be sold as sex slaves.
Any Yazidis who could
escape fled higher
into the mountains without food, adequate clothing or even, in some
cases, shoes. They remained trapped there for days, in harsh conditions and
with little
international support. Those who had originally promised to protect them,
the pesh merga soldiers of Masoud Barzani’s political party in Iraqi Kurdistan,
had melted away in their hour of need. It was Kurdish
guerrillas from Syria and Turkey who eventually fought their way over
the mountain through Islamic State territory, opening a corridor to bring
Yazidi survivors to safety in the self-declared autonomous area ofSyria called Rojava,
the Kurdish word for west.
Many of these
guerrillas were women, for a basic principle of the decades-long Kurdish
liberation movement is that women cannot wait for others to defend them, but
must themselves fight to be free. Indeed, some of these women say that they
fight for other women, because they know what horrors await those captured by
the Islamic State. In Rojava’s war
against the Islamic State, women can be found not only in the ranks but also in
command of guerrilla units. After their rescue from Mount Sinjar, some Yazidi
women decided to follow this example, and started their own militia, the
Women’s Protection Unit-Shengal (another name for Sinjar). Similarly, in Iraqi
Kurdistan, Yazidi women rescued from sexual slavery have formed their own
brigade.
Though female
guerrillas have fought in national liberation struggles in places from China to
Vietnam, Cuba to Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Iran and the Palestinian territories,
mainstream global feminist organizations have tended to follow the lead of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,
founded during World War I, which holds that the solution to women’s
victimization in wartime is, first, to oppose war and, second, to make sure
women are at the negotiating table when wars end.
The Kurdish liberation
movement’s approach, on the contrary, emphasizes self-defense in both military
and social terms. Female guerrillas are meant to be seen as exemplars who show
that female leadership is crucial in every sphere of society. In Rojava’s
system of autonomous
democracy (the area is within Syria’s borders), there are strong
mandates for the participation of women in governance, and all
organizations are led by both a man and a woman. Committees of women have real
authority over problems like forced marriage and domestic violence.
But it is the female
warrior in particular who offers a powerful counterimage to that of the raped
and dishonored victim who is considered a source of shame to her family and
community. Ancient, patriarchal ideas have made rape and sexual slavery a
central strategy in genocidal conflicts, meant to destroy the very identity of
the enemy. That’s how rape was used in Bosnia and
the Democratic Republic of Congo (and
earlier, in thepartition
of India and the liberation
war of Bangladesh), and that’s how it is being used today in Iraq and Syria.
Women like the Yazidis
who have been subjected to sexual violence on such a terrible scale cannot
easily be reintegrated into old patterns, nor will they thrive if they are seen
— and see themselves — as shamed victims. Part of the process of rehabilitation
has to involve challenging the stigma survivors face. Of course, there are
ways to do this without taking up arms. But the fact that some of the survivors
in the refugee
camps of Iraqi Kurdistan, which is still heavily patriarchal, have chosen
this path indicates the influence of the radical Kurdish female guerrillas. A
women’s council formed last July by Rojava-influenced Yazidis went so far as to
declare that the goal should not be to “buy back” abducted women and children,
as is common when dealing with the Islamic State, but to liberate them and at
the same time establish new traditions of self-defense.
That won’t be easy.
Two years after their capture, thousands
of Yazidi women and children remain in captivity. Many more are
scattered in refugee camps in Turkey,
Iraq or Rojava, while others have
tried to flee to Europe, some drowning on the way. But the epicenter of the
Yazidi struggle remains Sinjar Mountain, the ancestral home to which many now
in Iraqi refugee camps desperately
want to return.
One barrier in their
way remains the same Iraqi Kurdish forces of Masoud Barzani who abandoned them
two years ago, and whose pesh merga have capriciously operated the checkpoint
at the border crossing that leads to both Rojava and the north side of Sinjar Mountain,
making adequate access to essential supplies and building materials difficult
if not impossible. This has been done in cooperation with Turkey’s blockade of
the Rojava Kurds.
Those of us moved by
the plight of the Yazidis and the image of women fighting the Islamic State
can, and should, do more than express admiration from afar. We need to help the
American government listen to its own ideas about gender equality, democracy and
pluralism. The United States recently promised Mr. Barzani’s forces a generous
amount of military aid.
The price tag for that
aid must be freedom of movement for the Yazidis, so they can return to their
homes and rebuild, hopefully with full involvement by women and survivors of
the Islamic State’s sexual violence, and a permanent end to the blockade of
Rojava, whose guerrillas have been some of the only forces capable of fighting
the Islamic State - not in spite of their feminism, but because of it.
Meredith Tax is the author of “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.”
