They made me feel like a hero going off to war. The first part was yet to be demonstrated; the second was evidence. At that moment I could almost touch the sky; but my father, as always, slammed me down with a much-needed dose of reality, which caused a silence that could be broken: “Don’t let them catch you, daughter, do you hear me? And if they end up capturing you, the last bullet… the last bullet has to be for you!”.
(Keep reading: Turkey claims it killed suspected Islamic State leader in Syria)
Her eyes, large and dark, reddened from having been crying a little while before, did not even dare to look at me. His girl, the youngest, had grown up and had decided, without even consulting him, to go fight against the patriarchy that he unconsciously represented and step forward where so many men had stepped back to stand up to him. jihadism. But she didn’t blame him, she just wanted them, for once, to let me do what he thought I had to do; he just wanted, for once, to be able to choose.
The recommendation to take my life rather than let them capture me stuck in my brain. Since that day a bullet always accompanies me, well hidden. With her, I feel as if I had my father by my side, very close, watching over me; and he has comforted me at times when I have cried for colleagues who have had to end up shooting themselves in the middle of ambushes from which they knew they could only get out if they killed each other.
(You may be interested: From a tender teacher to indoctrinate the Islamic State: “It is a monster”)
The cruelties of the Islamic State went viral through social networks. My family, like so many others, saw almost in real time what those murderers did to women captured a few kilometers from home.
They watched in disbelief on the mobile screen as their hair was tied to the bumper of a vehicle and dragged to their deaths through the streets of the occupied towns. They displayed them in triumph, like the spoils of war. Some women, in the places we liberated, had inexplicably brutal bites on their faces or arms.
At some point they had forgotten to cover themselves with the niqab and the black tunic, as the Islamic State forced them to do, and in retaliation they punished them by nailing them with a huge aluminum metal denture, devilishly designed to maximize conscious suffering, and which literally ripped out those pieces of meat that the woman had dared to show, in a clear and unforgivable act of haram – ‘sin’ in Arabic. In sight and for life, they left people pierced, incurable, invaded by physical and emotional pain.
But before finding myself before those horrific scenes, as a militiawoman I still had to go through a long vital training, a path that at first I undertook alone and a little scared. But not for long. After a few hours I arrived at an instruction camp near the city of Serekaniye, with a Kurdish majority but also threatened by jihadists. Despite the shyness that characterizes me, I had to open up to about twenty colleagues. For almost a month, which seemed like a year to me because of how intense it was, they became my new family.
With them I assimilated hours of theoretical classes and sweated during a lot of practical sessions; I took my first assault rifle, assembled it, disassembled it, and reassembled it many times, until I was able to do it with my eyes closed. I began to live in houses and premises abandoned by families who were fleeing in the opposite direction to which we were moving. We did not earn a salary, but we have never lacked the basic assistance that our community has always provided us wherever we went.
‘Women, life, freedom’
I soon became friends with sixteen-year-old Chichek, who also enlisted against his family’s will. Her case was worse: they wanted to marry her off and she refused to live in what she understood as slavery. She didn’t even say goodbye when she left. And she didn’t want to go home. I did want to. I dreamed every day that my father received me with that hug that we didn’t know how to give each other when I left. Chichek ended up being my best friend.
At home, both of us, for different reasons, felt locked up, imprisoned, so now we opened the door and savored what freedom was, and we began to fight on two fronts: against the jihadism that wanted to exterminate us, but also against a patriarchy that, slowly and silently, was killing us.
After a few weeks we were closer to that dream. “Jin, jiyan, azadi!” (Women, life, freedom!), we shouted to celebrate our oath as new militia. Dressed in uniform, she already looked like one of those heroines that she admired so much as a child. My dream had come true!
We did not earn a salary, but we have never lacked the basic assistance that our community has always provided us wherever we went
Despite the initial disgust, my father would be proud of this Gulan, he told me to comfort me when I missed them. Suddenly, I saw myself pledging fidelity to concepts that until a few months ago would have been difficult for me to define, but which I already felt were basic principles: the defense of the community against runaway capitalism, of feminist society against recalcitrant machismo, environmentalism and democratic confederalism in the face of the repression that surrounded us.
Finally, she was part of the Popular Protection Units (YPG), which since 2012 had begun to incorporate women into its ranks. A presence that grew, especially over the following two years, coinciding with the jihadist expansion to build the self-styled caliphate in Syria and Iraq. I was one of the last additions to a group of almost 35,000 compañeras.
(Also read: Islamic State leader dies in Syria, according to the Pentagon)
We killed the extremists, but we also had to kill the hours, a lot… especially doing guard duty. And, by sharing confidences with the other militia women, I realize that their recruitment had been less traumatic than mine. The daughters of female soldiers, for example, chose that path without suffering so much despair and misunderstanding around them.
Unlike what happened to me, at home they had seen references to the struggle that began decades ago. Many, for example, grew up listening to the story of Besé. I didn’t know who she was, just as I didn’t know the stories of so many other brave women who have inspired the movement that now guides me.
heroines and horrors
Besé was one of the first armed Kurds to revolt and was killed by Turkish forces. It is said that she could not sit still and rebelled after watching the women of her village throw themselves off the rocks into the Munzur River to commit suicide before being raped by soldiers during the Dersin massacre in 1938. Two decades later, these The same lands of Kurdistan saw the birth of another worthy heir of the cause: Sakîne Cansiz.
As a young man he joined a group of university students. Among them was the then anonymous but already brilliant Abdullah Öcalan, who would go on to found the PKK (the Kurdish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Already in office and surrounded by an eminently male clique, he did not hesitate to say that we should all kill the man in us.
In fact, he became one of the intellectual leaders of the party, making the feminist discourse his own. And he always unconditionally supported Sakîne, who, years later, and already being a reference, would be arrested and locked up in Diyarbakir prison, the unofficial capital of the Kurdish region in Turkey. Öcalan has been sentenced to life imprisonment since 1999. Sakîne was shot in the head in Paris in 2013.
Those who shared a cell with her say that her figure was a key evolution of the movement: those Kurdish women who committed suicide by throwing themselves into the river so that the Turks would not besiege them now weave networks of resistance, also within the prisons themselves where they were held. they torture.
After a few years, Sakîne came out of prison with a clear obsession: creating an entirely female army. And that was how in 1995 the embryo of the female faction of the YPG was formed, to which I have promised to give my life. This is not the first time that women have joined the guerrillas, but the Rojava project has brought about a revolution in which women have occupied political, judicial or social spaces that until then had only been open to men.
The liberation of Kobane after three months of fierce fighting against the Islamic State was our most emblematic collective triumph and the one that pushed me to definitively join the cause. Women like us, prepared for all war fronts and all vital trenches, seek to liberate a people through gender liberation.
TXELL FEIXAS
ETHIC (**)
Graduated in Journalism and correspondent in the Middle East, residing in Beirut. She has covered the war against the Islamic State in Iraq, the fall of the Caliphate, the mortgage crisis from the United States and in 2015 she was in Greece to report on the negotiation for her rescue. She has worked for TV3, Catalunya Ràdio, the EFE Agency and El Periódico de Catalunya.
(**) Ethic is an ecosystem of knowledge for change from which we analyze the latest global trends through a commitment to information quality and under an inalienable editorial premise: progress without humanism is not really progress. This text is published with the authorization of Editorial Planeta, of which
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