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  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 Women’s 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. It’s 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 politics—from family feuds to terrorism to radical democracy and feminism—with 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 1880–1917

  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 donors—individuals and foundations—for 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

  Contents

  Glossary of Organizational Names

  Introduction: A Road Unforeseen

  1: The Kurds

  2: Separated at Birth

  3: Insurrection and Genocide

  4: The People Take Up the Struggle

  5: Kurdish Women Rising

  6: Democratic Autonomy in Turkey and Syria

  7: The Battle of Kobane and Its Backlash

  8: The Birth of Daesh

  9: Daesh vs. Kobane

  10: War and Peace in Turkey

  Coda: Some Questions Remain

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Glossary of Organizational Names

  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 Women’s Liberation Movement

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

  YRK-HPJ: Eastern Kurdistan Protection Units and Women’s Protection Units

  PYD: Democratic Union Party (Syria)

  YPG-YPJ: People’s Protection Units and Women’s Protection Units (Syria)

  TEV-DEM (multi-party civil society coalition)

  PKK: Kurdistan Workers Party (Turkey)

  TAJK: Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan

  HPG-YJA-Star: People’s Defense Forces and Free Women’s 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 1990–1993

  DEP 1993–1994

  HADEP 1994–2003

  DEHAP 2003–2006, merged with another Kurdish party to form the DTP

  DTP Democratic Society Party 2006–2009

  BDP Successor party to DTP 2008–2014, merged with HDP

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

  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 Women’s Protection Units (YPJ).

  INTRODUCTION

  A Road Unforeseen

  IN AUGUST 2014, DAESH—the Arabic acronym for the terrorist group that has been variously called ISIS, ISIL, and the Islamic State1—attacked 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.

  That such a liberated area even existed was big news to me. On that summer’s maps, Rojava—the Kurdish word fo
r “west”—looked like three unconnected yellow blobs making up an area slightly smaller than Connecticut, surrounded by a vast and menacing gray field representing territory controlled by Daesh. In the summer of 2014, the ski-masked jihadis of Daesh seemed invincible as they swept down on the terrified towns and cities of Iraq, while the Iraqi army and the vaunted Iraqi Kurdish militia, the peshmerga, fled before them. Not until Daesh reached Kobane did they meet guerrillas who had built something they were willing to fight for. Since then, the Rojava forces have captured Tal Abyad, linking two of the three yellow blobs to make a larger contiguous unit; Daesh has also lost other territory.

  The Obama administration had named Daesh an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” so the media were ecstatic to discover the photogenic young female guerrillas.2 The press tended, however, to avoid discussing what they stood for, and no wonder, for these girls did not fit into any acceptable Western narrative: They were feminists, socialists, if not indeed anarchists or communists, and led by a group linked to Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist organization by NATO, the UK, and the US.

  Fascinated, I searched for more information and found it mainly on anarchist websites, for the anarchist movement has been following the PKK ever since its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said American radical Murray Bookchin was a major influence on his thinking. But in October 2014, nobody else seemed to be paying much attention to Rojava or the PKK, as the anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote in a Guardian op-ed. Comparing the struggle against Daesh to that of the Spanish Republic in 1937, when his father had joined the International Brigade to fight fascism, Graeber called for similar solidarity with Rojava, saying it is “a remarkable democratic experiment. Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making bodies . . . and, in a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army . . . has carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State. How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by the international community, even, largely, by the international Left?”3

  In December 2014, when the Kurds in Kobane had been fighting Daesh for over two months with no help from anybody, the monthly news magazine In These Times organized a panel that framed the issues purely in terms of US military intervention. One of the panelists, Richard Falk, a human rights expert, said, “The plight of the Kurds in Kobani and their courage in resisting ISIS poses a tragic predicament that does challenge the kind of anti-interventionism that I feel is justified overall, particularly in the Middle East. But to overcome the presumption against military intervention, especially from the air, one needs very powerful evidence. . . . [T]he ISIS intervention doesn’t seem designed to actually deal with the problem. Rather, it looks like a projection of US power in the region.”4

  To Falk, the only important question was one of US power, not whether Kobane needed help or had asked for it or even what other kinds of help besides bombing might be available. To me, this single-minded focus on the US smacks of imperial narcissism. Like the neocons they hate, some on the Left see the US as all powerful—in their view, any popular movement that is not fighting the US is being manipulated by it, and the only thing Americans have to worry about is opposing their own government. Personally, I think the world has more than one “Evil Empire,” and agree with David Graeber that anti-imperialist critique is insufficient without solidarity. That means supporting people who stand for the same things progressives elsewhere support—human rights, a strong labor movement, separation between religion and politics, equality for all, racial justice, women’s liberation, an end to discrimination on the basis of sexuality or belief—and coming through when they ask for help.

  The more I learned about the Rojava cantons, the more I heard echoes in my mind of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s saga of a lust for power gone mad and a handful of people pitted against it in a battle that will decide the fate of the world. As their strategy council decides, “We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.”5 Only by destroying the ring of power, rather than trying to use it themselves, can Tolkien’s heroes defeat evil; only by destroying that metaphorical ring of power called the state, built on domination and ruled by force, do members of the Syrian and Turkish Kurdish liberation movement believe they can create societies based on equality, democracy, ecology, and mutual respect.

  Note that I am careful to say Syrian and Turkish Kurds, rather than just talk about “the Kurds,” as Western media often do in what sometimes looks like deliberate obfuscation. Because Americans have been hearing about the Iraqi Kurds since the Gulf War, many assume all Kurds are in Iraq. That is a misconception. Kurdistan was divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey after World War I. Today the dominant party in the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, led by Masoud Barzani, is competing with the Kurdish liberation movement of Rojava and the Turkish Kurds for ideological leadership. Like the little ethnic states that emerged in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, the Iraqi Kurds want their own nation. In contrast, the Kurdish liberation movement thinks the nation-state is old-fashioned in an age of globalization; they want something more democratic, feminist, and ethnically inclusive, and are trying to build it in Rojava.

  On New Year’s Day, 2015, I decided it was my responsibility to tell my friends about Rojava and sent out an email with a map and some links, saying, “At the end of such a dark and difficult year, one searches for light. It can sometimes be found in unexpected places.” Then I wrote an article for Dissent magazine, which was published in April 2015 and resulted in an invitation to write this book.6

  I agreed because I thought the matter was so urgent. But I had another reason: to answer my own questions about the Kurdish women’s movement and its militias. Because in all my years as a feminist on the Left, I had never seen an armed liberation struggle with women so clearly in front. They reminded me of the immigrant women of the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, of whom I wrote in my first book, The Rising of the Women. The strike was organized by a militant syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World, usually called the Wobblies; the local workforce was mostly immigrant; and since everybody—men, women, and children—worked in the mills, the strike involved the whole community.

  The employers mobilized anti-immigrant feeling to break the strike, students came out from Harvard to beat up strikers, and the governor of Massachusetts called out the National Guard. Thinking they had a better chance than men of facing armed police without getting shot, the women strikers used to march at the front of the IWW demonstrations. When reporters asked Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a Wobbly organizer, why the IWW was pushing women to the front, she said, “We don’t push women to the front—we’re the only organization that doesn’t hold them back and they go to the front!”7

  The leading role of Kurdish women in the war against Daesh, and what that implies about the kind of society they are trying to build, demands our attention. It is a crux, marking the stirrings of a new historical period. As Kurdish writer Memed Aksoy put it, “The Kurds and their country Kurdistan is the site of a great battle now, between freedom and enslavement, the womb from where a new civilisation has the opportunity to grow.”8

  I have lived through two such moments before: the sixties and the end of the Cold War.

  When I was growing up, the world was divided into two warring systems, called the “Free World” and “the Socialist Camp.” Each had its own narrative. The Free World narrative promised that an ever-expanding capitalist market would bring democratic rights, freedom, and prosperity to all. The US had come out of World War II in better shape than anybody else, with an economy so strong it could handle an enormously expensive arms and nuclear race and still have enough left over to fuel domestic consumption at unheard-of levels. The Free World narrative acknowledged that some would become richer than others, but promised that there would be enough refrigerators, cars, an
d Happy Meals for everyone. By the late sixties, the civil rights movement and youth rebellion had poked holes in US assertions of equality and democratic bliss, but the narrative still had a lot of power internationally.

  To this dream of democratic consumerism, the Soviet bloc counterposed a narrative in which power and wealth were shared, everyone had free healthcare and education, and there was no gulf between rich and poor. The goal was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”9 But there was a large gap between this promise and reality. The Soviet Union had lost huge numbers of people and most of its industrial base in World War II. By the sixties, it had managed to pull nearly equal in the arms race but only at enormous cost to its people, many of whom had to live three families to an apartment and line up to get basic subsistence needs. They longed for the consumer comforts of the West. And while they had jobs and health care, they lacked the freedoms that might have made them feel they had some control over their lives, for in practice communist parties were top-down authoritarian elites, and their people unwilling subjects.

  In the eighties, when the USSR got stuck in the quagmire of a war in Afghanistan, its whole edifice became economically and politically unsustainable. In 1989, it withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter the Communist Party dissolved and the USSR itself fell to bits. The former Soviet empire became a collection of nationalist states, many run by demagogues and oligarchs, distinguished mainly for corruption and authoritarianism.

  During the Cold War, people in the communist-influenced Left used to refer to the Soviet Union and its allies as “really-existing socialism”—meaning, okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it was the best people had come up with so far. Their whole world crumbled when the Soviet Union did. They lost their political bearings and also lost their language, not knowing what words to use anymore for the aspirations of social justice they still cherished. Many fell into a reactive anti-US stand that shaped their view of the entire world: Anything the US supported must be bad; anything that opposed the US must be good, including Islamist jihadis who said they were anti-imperialist.10 Their thinking was frozen in Cold War dichotomies and, if they no longer had anything to defend, at least they could still criticize the triumph of capital.