Daughters of Kobani author on how Kurdish women fighters in Syria became ‘world’s best hope against Isis’

INTERVIEW

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s new book follows the incredible story of a group of women who stopped the advance of the extremists

The Daughters of Kobani follows the Women’s Protection units (YPJ) in their battle against Isis (Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)

By Taz Ali

July 12, 2021 7:00 am

An author has documented the extraordinary journey of a group of young Kurdish women who fought to protect their small Syrian town and ended up stopping the advance of Isis.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, a New York Times bestselling writer, followed the women of the northern Syrian town of Kobani which, in 2014, was under siege by Islamic State militants.

The Women’s Protection Units, also known as the YPJ, were part of the Kurdish forces that managed to reclaim the town in early 2015 and the jihadists were driven back further into Syria. Up to 70 per cent of Kobani was destroyed or damaged after months of street battles.

The story of the women is told in Lemmon’s book The Daughters of Kobani.

“They are not just fighting against Isis but also fighting for women’s equality,” Lemmon told i.

A man looks at the rubble of buildings destroyed in the 2015 clashes between Isis and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria (Photo: Halil Fidan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Kurds do not have a state of their own and the land they live on is spread over a swathe of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran (Kobani is on Syria’s northern border with Turkey.)

Across the region, the Kurds have long faced prejudice against their ethnic and linguistic identity.

The YPJ is made up of a mix of women who saw what devastation Isis caused to their community, and also those who had long been committed to standing up for Kurdish rights – including the right to celebrate their culture and use their language.

“All these things the Kurdish community have faced huge challenges in exercising,” said Lemmon, speaking from her home in Washington.

“One young person said, ‘We didn’t think this would be our lives, we never thought that this would be what our future would turn out to be.’

“At the beginning, there were young people who took up arms thinking that they would kick the regime [of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad] out. That’s sort of as far as it went, there was no thought of fighting Isis or anything like that. That was the thing that always struck me, this was a conflict that no one could’ve foreseen.”

One of the women Lemmon interviewed for her book was a fighter from Raqqa – a city in eastern Syria which was also captured by Islamic State. She had been forced by her brother to marry an Isis fighter at the age of 18.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (Photo: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)

“She went through brutality that, even for somebody like me who has the privilege of seeing and hearing these stories, actually made me sick,” Lemmon said. “She was brave enough to try to escape multiple times, every time she gets sent back. She’s not allowed to go back to her mother’s house according to her brother.

“She’s brutalised by her husband and tries to break free of the marriage, she ends up being harmed in ways that are truly unimaginable.

“She manages to get back to home in Raqqa. I said to her, ‘How are you here? What makes you have the courage to keep getting up every morning?’ And she looks at me and was like, ‘Why should anybody have the right to do this to another person? Why do we just stand by?’”

Azeema standing in the Kobani countryside in January 2015 (Photo: Mustafa Alali)

Another memorable moment came when the author spent an evening with YPJ fighter Azeema, who received a call from her sister. The pair squabbled as Azeema was annoyed with the calls and demanded her sister stop ringing. “Everyone can relate to that moment, you don’t not answer to your family,” Lemmon joked.

“Couple of nights later we sat with her sister, who said, ‘She told me to stop calling, I told you we’re in the middle of a fight with Isis, why are you calling me, I’ll call you when this is over, you got to leave me alone right now – but at least I knew she was alive.’

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“The humanity of knowing that’s somebody’s sister, that really stayed with me.”

Lemmon described the terrifying experience of visiting the front line during her trips to Syria between 2017 and 2020, and how many women fighters faced the daily threat of violence almost completely unfazed.

“Klara, one of the commanders, takes us to the front line and just the drive was truly chilling because it’s silent except for distant armed fire and mortar rounds. Klara was completely impervious to it, and that’s when it first struck me that for these women this was their daily commute to work.”

Fighters from the Women’s Protection units (YPJ) (Photo: Delil Souleiman/ AFP via Getty Images)

It was the US-led coalition fighting Isis that thrust the YPJ into the spotlight, Lemmon said. What started in 2013 as a protection unit to safeguard their local areas became something global. Fighting alongside their male colleagues in the YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units), the YPJ became the world’s best option to stop the Isis advance.  

“They weren’t just fighting Isis for themselves, it was for the rest of the world,” Lemmon said.

“When men do remarkable, groundbreaking things, we call them leaders, when women do the same we call them exceptions, and we make them superheroes. And they’re not, they’re just people rising to the moment. They’re not unlike so many other women.”

Daughters of Kobani: The Women Who Took on the Islamic State, by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Swift Press, £16.99 (Hardback)