What’s in it for me? Fight on the frontlines alongside a group of women who stood up to ISIS.
The northern Syrian city of Kobani was surrounded.
Battle-hardened fighters from the Islamic extremist group ISIS controlled three-quarters of the city; their tanks had advanced to Mishtanour, a strategic hilltop nearby.
For days, militias fought ISIS on Mishtanour until they were commanded to withdraw.
But some fighters didn’t obey the order.
Among them was a woman named Arin Mirkan.
Instead of pulling back, Mirkan decided to strap a grenade to her waist and charge an oncoming ISIS tank.
When she reached the tank, she detonated the grenade, killing herself and all of the fighters inside.
Mirkan was part of a militia led entirely by women – the “daughters” of Kobani whose goals went beyond simply defeating ISIS.
They were also fighting for women’s rights in a culture that claimed women had none.
These blinks tell the stories of four incredible women – Azeema, Rojda, Nowruz, and Znarin – who took part in that fight.
A warning before we begin: These blinks contain disturbing accounts of violence, sexual abuse, and misogyny.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how a soccer match eventually led to a civil war; what happened when Azeema got shot; and how the women-led Kurdish forces helped take back Raqqa.
A Nation Divided
It was a soccer match that would live in infamy.
In the early 2000s, two rival clubs faced off in a championship game in the Syrian town of Qamishli.
Envision the scene: the home side is made up of Kurds, a stateless ethnic group spread across four Middle Eastern nations.
Opposing them is a club from Deir Ezzor, a town with a majority Arab population.
The game begins like any important match: with trash-talking and insults hurled from player to opposing player.
But, soon, the rivalry turns ugly.
A brawl breaks out, and before long Syrian authorities show up to intervene.
And their intervention isn’t peaceful.
Police begin shooting at the unarmed Kurdish fans, killing over two dozen and injuring another hundred.
In response, young Kurds lashed out at their local governments, inciting riots and defacing murals.
The uprising quickly spread to nearby towns, resulting in the destruction of government offices and the jailing of thousands of Kurds.
Order soon returned.
All told, the unrest lasted only two weeks.
But the events marked a sea change in Syrian politics.
In particular, they revealed the willingness of young Kurds to confront the Syrian government, led by its dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
That willingness would be put to the test again seven years later, in 2011 – the year that marked the start of the Syrian civil war.
In early 2011, a group of young Syrian schoolboys marched against the Assad regime.
It was a peaceful protest, and it took place on school grounds – but Assad reacted with violence.
He had the boys rounded up, arrested, and tortured.
They were beaten, electrocuted, and hanged upside down.
Outraged, the boys’ fathers and other Syrians organized a march in the city of Deraa.
It, too, was peaceful.
But, again, Assad resorted to violence: his soldiers opened fire on the protesters.
Soon, other protests began to flare up in surrounding towns, and, before long, the conflict grew into a global conflagration.
Millions of Syrians were being displaced from their homes, while sovereign powers like Russia, the United States, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia sought to use the conflict to fight proxy wars among themselves.
As part of the conflict, young people in the majority-Kurdish regions in northeastern Syria began signing up to fight in militias called People’s Protection Units, known collectively as the YPG.
The YPG was somewhat of an anomaly: though they didn’t support Assad, they didn’t necessarily want to see his regime toppled, either.
Their primary objective was Kurdish autonomy.
So, rather than throw their support behind one side or the other, the Kurds fought to protect their regions from external attack – no matter who the aggressor.
At the same time, Kurds feared the Islamic extremism they saw stirring among the anti-Assad rebels.
And they were right to be afraid.
Taking advantage of the chaos and power vacuums created by the civil war, a group called the Islamic State – better known as ISIS or ISIL – was setting up to take control of territory and spread its ideology throughout the Middle East.
Dueling Ideologies
ISIS tolerates only the strictest, most extreme interpretation of Islam.
Their ultimate goal is to revive the Islamic empire of the seventh century and to reign supreme from the Middle East to the far reaches of the world.
As they gained power, it became apparent that their law – Sharia law – would be enforced without mercy.
They would behead, imprison, and murder any who stood in their way.
It also became clear that a cornerstone of ISIS’s worldview is the oppression, subjugation, and enslavement of women.
This may not have been obvious at first.
But there was no denying it by the time ISIS reached the Iraqi town of Sinjar in August 2014.
There, it unleashed the full force of its brutality on the Yazidis, a religious minority that ISIS deemed “devil worshippers.
” The Yazidis, ISIS declared, must convert immediately to Islam or be killed en masse.
ISIS forces rounded up and shot men and boys; they kidnapped girls and women and distributed them as spoils to their fighters, who would rape, torture, and forcibly marry them.
ISIS even formed a market for the trade and sale of these girls and women.
ISIS’s worldview stood in stark contrast to that of the People’s Protection Units, which took their cues from a charismatic Turkish activist named Abdullah Öcalan.
In the mid-1970s, Öcalan organized a political group called the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, in his home nation of Turkey.
The organization, which exists to this day, is left leaning and places strong emphasis on the issue of women’s rights.
Women, Öcalan insisted, must be equal to men for a society to be truly free.
The PKK’s other central tenet was Kurdish independence.
Kurds were promised a state of their own in the wake of World War I, but that promise was swiftly broken by Turkey’s first president in 1923.
The late 1970s saw the PKK’s ideas spread into Syria.
At that time, the Syrian leader, Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, was providing safe refuge for Öcalan.
Al-Assad was entirely unsympathetic to the Kurdish plight and continued to deny them rights.
Nevertheless, he and Öcalan shared Turkey as a common enemy.
By harboring Öcalan, Assad kept the PKK’s ire directed at Turkey rather than Syria.
Öcalan used the opportunity to quietly spread his ideas throughout Syria.
Beliefs in Kurdish rights, economic justice, and women’s equality began taking hold in Syrian Kurdish towns and cities.
Eventually, Öcalan’s ideas crystallized into a new Syrian Kurdish political group: the Democratic Union Party.
That party helped to found the YPG – the People’s Protection Units – that rose up in response to Assad’s aggression in the early 2000s.
At YPG meetings, leaders passed around papers Öcalan had written on patriarchy, class, and history.
So, for the YPG, the fight against ISIS was more than a physical battle.
It was also an ideological one.
ISIS’s worldview was an extreme version of everything the YPG stood against, but defeating it was merely the first obstacle in the way of achieving women’s rights.
Four Kurdish Women Take Up Arms
Azeema remembers the day she announced her views on marriage.
She was sitting with one of her older sisters watching her favorite Syrian soap opera.
Both sisters looked on as one of the main characters was abused and beaten by her husband.
Azeema feared that her sister, who had just gotten engaged, might end up subjected to similar treatment.
“You shouldn’t get married,” Azeema told her sister.
“I’m never getting married.
Ever.
” She was only 13 years old.
Azeema and her siblings had been raised on Öcalan’s teachings, thanks to their father.
As a result, Azeema strongly shared Öcalan’s convictions about women’s liberation and Kurdish rights.
When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Azeema seized the chance to fight for her beliefs and signed up for the YPG.
At her first meeting, Azeema was surprised to recognize one of the other attendees.
It was her childhood friend and distant relative, Rojda.
If Azeema was a voice booming through a loudspeaker, Rojda was a mere whisper.
But just because she was quiet and calm didn’t mean she was passive.
One summer, Rojda was playing soccer with her cousin when her deeply conservative uncle shouted at them to stop, crying that it was haram – forbidden – for girls to play the sport.
“You’re wrong,” Rojda responded.
“Soccer is for everyone.
” She refused to stop.
The woman who would become Azeema and Rojda’s leader, Nowruz, was nearly a decade older than the two of them.
From the time she was young, Nowruz had been sensitive to the plight of women in her culture.
Her mother was a strong-willed woman who’d been forced into an arranged marriage.
She always told Nowruz: “Don’t be like me.
.
.
.
Never rely on others for your future.
” Nowruz took her mother’s warning to heart.
She intended to pursue her dreams and become a doctor – but fate had other plans.
Znarin, another recruit, had also wished to become a doctor.
But Znarin’s family was even more conservative than Nowruz’s.
At the age of 17, Znarin’s father pulled her out of school.
The patriarch of the family, Znarin’s uncle, opposed girls receiving an education – and Znarin’s father had no say in the matter.
Just like that, Znarin’s dream was crushed.
But that was far from the end of it.
Znarin’s uncle prevented her from marrying the man she loved, insisting that she should marry one of his sons – her cousin – instead.
This time, Znarin refused to obey.
By the time Znarin joined the militia, in 2013, women had been fighting alongside the YPG’s men for two years – and they wanted credit for it.
So they formed their own separate but equal part of the YPG called the YPJ, or Women’s Protection Units.
The YPJ would consist of both women and men fighters, but their leaders would be exclusively women.
The YPJ’s biggest challenge was to come a few years after its formation, in the city of Kobani.
An Alliance is Forged
Azeema squints with one of her dark brown eyes into her rifle-mounted scope.
She’s kneeling, her body folded into the shape of an S.
Her breathing is calm and measured.
Seeing movement in the street below, she holds her breath and counts.
With her right finger, she squeezes the rifle’s trigger and lets out several shots.
Below, a body crumples.
After a few more shots, she stands up and tucks her rifle away, knowing that ISIS fighters will soon begin shooting back.
“I am going to behead you, Azeema,” snarls an ISIS leader known as “the Sheikh” through the radio.
ISIS fighters and the YPG listen in on each other’s radio conversations and sometimes direct taunts at one another.
Azeema takes the Sheikh’s words as a compliment: her sniping skills are formidable enough that ISIS wants her, specifically, dead.
It’s January 2014 and, by this point, Azeema is in command of several hundred YPG and YPJ members.
They’re stationed in Kobani, which ISIS began to assault in mid-September 2014.
The city is a strategic location that, if captured, would allow ISIS easy passage from their self-declared capital, Raqqa, to the Syrian city of Aleppo.
During that year, ISIS continued to gain ground.
Unbeknownst to them, however, the YPG and YPJ had already received an overture from a powerful ally: the United States.
Back in January, President Obama claimed that ISIS was “junior varsity.
” It wasn’t long before he was proven wrong.
Later that same month, ISIS captured Raqqa, Syria’s sixth-largest population center.
By the summer, they had easily taken Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
Then there was the crisis in the small town of Sinjar in northern Iraq.
There, tens of thousands of Yazidis were forced to flee into the nearby mountains after ISIS ripped men and women, boys and girls, away from their families and killed, raped, or tortured them.
After that, the United States felt there was no choice but to intervene, though it had no desire to get involved in another Middle Eastern war.
So, its intervention had a caveat: it absolutely refused to commit American ground forces to the fight.
Instead, it would try to select and partner with a force that was already on the ground in Syria.
It had to be someone willing to fight ISIS but stop short of trying to topple Assad.
The US didn’t want to be responsible for another Middle Eastern regime change.
Eventually, it set its sights on the Syrian Kurds in the People’s Protection Units.
A number of factors converged in the group’s favor.
It had a history of standing up to ISIS and had recently rescued tens of thousands of Yazidis from Mount Sinjar.
Moreover, the Kurds sought self-rule rather than regime change.
After a series of discussions between the Americans and the YPG, the Americans decided to commit to the partnership.
Just weeks later, ISIS attacked Kobani, immediately putting the alliance to the test.
Kobani Under Siege
The battle for Kobani is full of harrowing moments.
Azeema and Rojda fought as commanders on the front lines, reporting to Nowruz, who led the entire YPJ.
Znarin served as Nowruz’s aid.
By the end of September 2014, ISIS controlled three-quarters of the city.
To stop its advance, Nowruz had to take action.
So she commanded her leaders to pull back and fortify every possible street in Kobani.
They should prepare to fight it out street by street, house by house.
The fighting has already begun when Azeema’s radio crackles.
It’s Nowruz.
“Haval Azeema,” she says, invoking the Kurdish word for “comrade.
” Nowruz continues: “What’s happening there?
What’s the situation?
” She’s calling because she knows Azeema’s forces are under fire.
She needs to see whether Azeema is still alive, and then, whether she can help.
After Azeema responds, Nowruz tells her to stay put – Azeema is known for her risk-taking behavior.
But just then, Azeema receives another message.
It’s a cell phone call from Dilawer, one of the men who’s fighting with her.
He tells her that Daesh – ISIS – has trapped him and a group of others inside a building.
They’re sitting ducks.
Azeema feels ice-cold fear creep into her heart.
She’s running on hardly any sleep, and she’s eaten only bread in the last 40 hours.
But she knows she has to get her comrades out.
Nowruz has commanded her to stay in position, but if Azeema does nothing, they’ll die.
Calling for a few of her comrades to come with her, Azeema rises to the occasion and creeps out from her station.
She and the others begin running along the streets, crouched low to the ground.
ISIS fires bullet after bullet at them as they run.
Finally, Azeema and her forces reach Dilawer’s location, uninjured.
There, Azeema stalls.
How can she create an opening so Dilawer and the others can escape?
If she gets any closer, she’ll certainly be killed by ISIS bullets.
There’s only one solution: to phone the Americans and request an airstrike.
Minutes after she carefully details her request, a B-1 bomber shakes the earth, dropping its payload on several nearby buildings.
The smoke from the strike billows out and provides enough cover for Azeema to rescue her comrades.
All 25 of them survive.
As the months wear on, ISIS’s power slowly begins to wane.
At the start of November 2014, ISIS controlled about 60 percent of Kobani.
But reinforcements for the YPG were arriving, and American aid had expanded; airdrops arrived at night to deliver much-needed medical supplies, ammunition, and arms to Kobani.
ISIS, for its part, was relentless.
Nowruz eagerly awaited the end of each day.
Every waking hour was spent standing at the YPG and YPJ headquarters, speaking to her commanders, like Azeema and Rojda, over the radio, while Znarin brought her food she never touched.
When would the fight finally end?
Kobani Victorious
It’s January 2015, and optimism is growing as US airstrikes devastate ISIS convoys and supplies.
But the fighting is still ugly.
Azeema is considering how to counter the latest ISIS offensive against a school on the eastern side of Kobani.
Nowruz wants her to remain on the southern front line, but Azeema feels that her help is needed elsewhere.
So, she and her forces head for the school.
When they arrive, Azeema notices a man there with a bald head, brown eyes, a beard – and a gun pointed straight at her.
She aims her AK-47 at him and shoots as he shoots back.
His first bullet misses her by three inches.
After the two exchange a second round of shots, Azeema tries to reposition her AK-47 and finds that, strangely, she can’t move her left arm.
She’s still able to get off another shot, but she can’t see through the scope – everything’s blurry.
Glancing down at her chest, she sees a growing splotch of red.
She’s worried that the bullet might have hit her in the heart.
Even so, she fires twice more at the man.
One bullet connects with his leg, forcing him to hop away from the battlefield.
Immediately after, Azeema limps into a black pickup to be taken to the hospital.
The doctor determines that the bullet has penetrated her chest and is very close to her heart.
Still, she’s likely to recover.
Azeema tries to argue that she can easily go back to be with her squad right away, but the doctor refuses to allow it.
Fast-forward 20 days later, to January 26, and the battle for Kobani is over.
Azeema, still struggling to keep standing, joins five male commanders to officially declare victory.
With the help of American air support, the Kurdish ground forces have done it: driven the Islamic State from a key battleground.
This victory proved to the Americans that the YPG was a force to be reckoned with – and a partner they could trust.
But they needed to expand the partnership further, to include Arabs in addition to Kurds.
Otherwise, it would be much more difficult to confront ISIS and set up bases in Syrian towns without Kurdish majorities.
After a mostly failed attempt to train and arm moderate Syrian opposition fighters, the United States made an offer to the Kurds.
If they could formally add Arabs to their ranks, the US would support the coalition.
The Kurds completed the request in short order.
But the newly combined force needed a name that reflected its inclusivity – one that made it clear that the force included Syrians of all backgrounds, and that didn’t make it seem like the Syrian Kurds were seeking their own nation.
The name they settled on was one recommended by Mazlum Abdi, the leader of the YPG.
They would be called the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
Taking Back Manbij
Nowruz looks down at her watch: 11:03 p.
m.
It’s May 30, 2016, and she’s standing on top of a hill overlooking the Euphrates River.
Down below, SDF boats bob on the water’s surface, trying to reach the opposite side.
Their destination is Manbij, a northern Syrian city with a population of around 300,000.
Manbij’s residents have, for two years, been under the control of the Islamic State.
ISIS targeted it because of its position as a key transit point for the foreign fighters pouring in to join them.
Now, the SDF is in the process of trying to liberate the city, with Nowruz and other leaders at the helm.
The SDF needs to cross the Euphrates by boat, a process made difficult by several obstacles.
Most frightening of all is the fact that the crossing will leave Nowruz’s forces visible to ISIS fighters, who can pick them off from the high ground they hold on the other side.
On the outside, Nowruz seems cool and collected – she’s been planning the logistics of the operation with her American partners for over a month.
But on the inside, her stomach is churning; she paces back and forth incessantly.
Finally, she hears a voice on the radio: “We made it.
We’re across,” whispers Raheema, one of Nowruz’s commanders.
The first boat has made it – but only the first.
There are many more crossings to be made that night.
Meanwhile, one of the women crossing the river is none other than Znarin, who’s now in command of her own fighting force, 50 soldiers strong.
When Nowruz gave her the promotion, Znarin feared she wasn’t ready.
But Nowruz reassured her that she was – she wouldn’t have been selected otherwise.
Six days after the river crossing, ISIS snipers have picked off several of Znarin’s fighters.
Losses are increasing – and Znarin knows she needs to help her squad’s morale.
She takes inspiration from a speech she heard Nowruz give her squad in Kobani: “They want to break us and to make us weak, but we can’t let them,” she tells her friends and fellow fighters.
“We’re not just fighting for ourselves, but for humanity.
” In the end, capturing the city was a long, complicated slough for Znarin and the SDF.
ISIS used brutal tactics – hidden explosives, car bombs, human shields.
But, in late June, they were ready to capture the city center.
Still, ISIS chose to go down fighting.
Finally, a few weeks later, on August 12, a convoy emerged from the city, carrying ISIS fighters as well as other ISIS members, their families, and hostages.
That day was a first for Znarin.
It was the first time she’d led forces directly from the field.
And it transformed her from a follower to a leader.
Heart of Darkness
Four thousand troops stand at Rojda’s command.
They’re a mixture of Arab and Kurdish, men and women.
The YPJ has grown from a defiant group of a few hundred troops to a formidable force of several thousand.
For her part, Rojda has come into her own as a leader.
Her quiet confidence has inspired her fighters in a way quite unlike Azeema’s loud brashness.
She no longer feels afraid when she enters combat, as she did in Kobani.
She’s now intimately familiar with the smell of gunpowder, and she can immediately recognize the roar of a coming airstrike.
She knows the feeling of losing beloved friends and battlefield companions as well as the burning desire for revenge against the men of ISIS.
In short, she’s ready to take on Raqqa: the capital of the Islamic State.
Her campaign begins in Tabqa, a town with a nearby dam that serves as a critical source of electricity, clean water, and irrigation for ISIS.
If the SDF doesn’t take it before moving onto Raqqa, ISIS will be able to use the dam as a pathway for troop reinforcements.
The fight for the dam is long and grueling; Rojda’s forces lay siege to it for over a month before ISIS finally relents.
After the campaign, her fighters are utterly exhausted.
But Rojda knows in her heart that the fight to take Raqqa will stretch their limits even more.
As Rojda and her forces, which includes Znarin, advance toward the city, snipers and mortar fire slow their progress.
Suicide bombers sequester themselves in buildings, waiting for SDF troops to get close enough to detonate their bombs.
ISIS has hidden mines everywhere imaginable – even inside tea kettles.
Still, by the first week of July, Rojda’s forces have managed to capture a quarter of the city.
By the end of August, that fraction has increased to two-thirds.
And at the start of October, ISIS holds only the central hospital and stadium.
Yet ISIS still utterly refuses to surrender.
Finally, in mid-October, tribal elders in Raqqa lay out a plan.
They don’t want any more bloodshed and offer to organize transportation out of the city for the remaining ISIS fighters.
Neither the Americans nor Rojda’s forces are happy about the deal, but they accept it nonetheless.
And so it came to pass.
On October 15, 300 ISIS fighters and over 3,000 civilians – including 400 hostages – were driven to the nearby town of Markada in a convoy of over a hundred vehicles.
For the remaining ISIS forces, the ultimatum was clear.
They could either get out of Raqqa on the buses or face the next SDF offensive.
Not all chose the former.
But it didn’t make a difference.
Two days later, on October 17, the black flag of ISIS no longer waved above Raqqa’s central hospital.
It had been replaced by a yellow flag – the flag of the SDF.
The battle for Raqqa was over.
One Fight Ends, Another Begins
Rojda is sitting in a white pickup truck headed for Raqqa’s Naim Square, also called Paradise Square.
Gunshots, mortars, car bombs, suicide attacks – all are suddenly absent.
It’s finally time to celebrate victory over the Islamic State.
When ISIS was in charge, Paradise Square had become known as Hell Square.
It was where the terrorists blindfolded, lined up, and shot their enemies.
It was where they had kept women in cages until they could be sold to the highest bidder.
And it was where they cut off the hands and heads of people who broke their rules, after which they stuck the severed heads on bent metal stakes lining the square.
As Rojda travels to the square, she sees the full extent of the devastation and wreckage that ISIS has wrought: the rubble, the bombed-out buildings, the torn-up streets.
Rebuilding this place will take a long time and cost a lot of money.
Today, though, they won’t concern themselves with such matters.
In Naim Square, Rojda and her fighters acknowledge everything they’ve sacrificed in order to beat ISIS.
They run and dance across the square, waving flags and pumping their fists.
They allow themselves to hope for a better future.
But above the square waves a flag that sends a spike of pain into the Americans’ hearts.
It depicts the man whose ideas form the core of the YPG’s ideology: Abdullah Öcalan.
For many in the American State Department, that flag confirms that the United States’ partners have turned out to be political zealots.
But for Rojda, Znarin, and their comrades, Öcalan was a key symbolic aspect of their celebrations.
Without him and his philosophy of women’s liberation, there may never have been a YPG in the first place.
Back in December 2015, a political counterpart to the SDF had been formed, called the Syrian Democratic Council, or SDC.
One of the SDC’s goals was to create a constitution for the entirety of northeastern Syria.
Now, that constitution was in place – though it wasn’t recognized by any sovereign nations.
The Social Contract of the Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria is a radical document.
It centers on women’s rights, guaranteeing, for one, that women will colead all the towns that fall under the constitution’s jurisdiction.
It enshrines women’s freedoms and rights, making clear that women should enjoy free will in their family lives.
It treats violence, manipulation, and discrimination as punishable crimes.
The constitution was made possible by the actions of brave women like Azeema, Rojda, Nowruz, and Znarin.
Their actions have proven that women, too, can fight as snipers and field commanders, sacrificing their lives for their people.
People have finally seen the possibility for women to take their place as men’s equals.
And it’s that possibility that these women will continue to fight for.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: After the fight in Raqqa, the SDF went on to take down the final few ISIS outposts.
The official end of the conflict was March 23, 2019.
Just six months later, the Kurds once again found themselves at war.
This time, the aggressors were neither terrorists nor Assad, but a sovereign nation, Turkey, who’d long ago designated the YPG a terrorist organization, given its ties to Abdullah Öcalan.
As of now, Turkey controls a portion of northeastern Syria along their shared border.
They continue to threaten attacks in Kobani and other Kurdish-majority cities.
A diminished US presence remains, with soldiers assisting the Syrian Kurds to maneuver as well as providing some measure of leverage.
As for Nowruz, Znarin, Azeema, and Rojda, each of them hopes desperately for an end to the conflict.
Still, some things have improved for them since the end of the war, particularly in regards to their family lives.
Rojda’s uncle – the one who’d tried to stop her from playing soccer – now actively seeks out her advice.
And Znarin counts her uncle – the one who’d stopped her from getting an education and almost arranged her marriage – among her friends.
The future of northeastern Syria and the Kurdish women and men living there is as yet uncertain.
No matter what happens, though, Kurdish women will not stop fighting for their rights.
They will no longer allow the world to tell them what they should want and how they should ask for it.
Instead, they will tell you themselves, in their own voices, for all to hear.
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