Kurdish Women’s Struggle For Gender Equality – And Much Else Besides

For a century, Kurdish women have been at the forefront of the struggle against patriarchal and state oppression. They continue to push boundaries and defend their gains against mounting pressure.

By Nazand Begikhani

April 12, 2026

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

Yanar Mohammed speaking at a conference in Berlin in 2013.

On 2 March this year, Yanar Mohammed, a prominent feminist figure in Iraq, was shot dead outside her home by two gunmen – the latest in a string of activists killed, likely by units of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, Shia militias (1). A tireless advocate for gender equality, she had spent years campaigning against honour crimes, early and forced marriages, and all forms of violence against women. Based on women’s rights media outlet, such as Newjin, Yanar’s assassination is part of an alarming escalation in gender-based violence currently affecting Iraq and several other countries across the Middle East.

This intensification of violence against women cannot be separated from the context of war, instability and political fragmentation ravaging the region. Kurdistan, divided among four nation-states in the Middle East, remains particularly vulnerable despite a century-long intersectional struggle against multiple forms of patriarchal and state oppression. While Kurdish women are widely recognised for their decisive role in the fight against ISIS – particularly within the fighting forces in Syria and Iraq – they have also remained deeply committed to advancing women’s rights, equality and freedom in their societies.

Legal and institutional reforms in Iraqi Kurdistan

In Iraqi Kurdistan, since the uprising of 1991 women have played a central role in awareness campaigns against inequality and discriminatory practices rooted in certain social traditions and in the Baathist legal system, including the Iraqi Personal Status Law of 1959 and the Iraqi Penal Code number 111 of 1969. Thanks to their persistent mobilisation and determination, and the support of progressive figures within the regional government, Kurdistan achieved several important advances: the recognition of honour crimes as murders without mitigating circumstances, the restriction of polygamy in several jurisdictions, expanded rights to divorce and fairer provisions regarding child custody.

With the rise of cyber violence, the regional parliament – encouraged by a dynamic civil society and supported by reform-minded leaders – in 2008 passed Law No. 6 on Preventing the Misuse of New Information Technologies. The aim was to curb digital harassment, protect victims and ensure accountability for perpetrators. A year later, in 2009, the legal minimum quota for female parliamentarians was increased from 25% to 30% of the legislature.

Women in Kurdistan have also successfully mobilised political elites in support of women’s rights and broader social policies. This effort led to the institutionalisation of women’s issues through the creation of the Combatting Violence Against Women Directorate (2007), the High Council of Women’s Affairs (2011) and the Women’s Rights Monitoring Board (2012), headed at the time by Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. These initiatives resulted in the establishment of shelters for women at risk and training programmes for judges, law enforcement officers, social workers and government officials. In parallel, the Kurdistan Region encouraged the creation of gender studies centres to analyse these societal challenges, conduct research and produce evidence-based knowledge grounded in feminist and ethical approaches. In 2011 the regional parliament enacted Law No 8 combatting domestic violence, one of the most progressive legal frameworks of its kind in the region.

These reforms have largely remained confined to the Kurdistan Region. In the rest of Iraq where Yanar was particularly active, not only did similar legal progress fail to materialise, but in August 2024 the Iraqi Supreme Court ruled that some reforms passed by the Kurdistan parliament went against sharia law (2). Women saw the decision as a major setback. When the Iraqi parliament subsequently passed the Jaafari Personal Status Code in August 2025, Kurdish women mobilised strongly against it, arguing that the legislation discriminates against women and privileges men in matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance and child guardianship. Yanar campaigned forcefully against the Al-Jaafari Law, arguing that it undermined the rights of women and girls while legitimising discriminatory, religious and tribal interpretations of marriage and women’s legal status.

In the context of the ongoing conflict and war, Hana Shwan – a journalist and prominent feminist figure in Iraqi Kurdistan, who visited women in shelters and prisons last week and whom I interviewed for this article – described how the conflict has acutely intensified uncertainty and fear among the most vulnerable women, particularly those in shelters and prisons, while simultaneously eroding her organisation’s ability to sustain its work in Sulaimaniya, near the border of Iran. Echoing Simone de Beauvoir, she emphasised that the conflict has not produced new inequalities so much as it has exposed and amplified entrenched gender discrimination, deepened structural injustices, and accelerated patterns of interpersonal violence. Natia Navrouzov, a Yazidi lawyer and head of the NGO Yazda based in Duhok with offices in Sinjar, underscored the compounded impact of conflict and violence in the Middle East in exacerbating mental health crises among affected communities. She noted that the ongoing bombardment across the Kurdistan Region has forced her organisation to suspend all field activities, further limiting access to already scarce psychosocial support services.

Despite the many obstacles impeding the these reforms’ implementation – particularly the rise of Islamist influence since the emergence of ISIS in 2014 – women in the Kurdistan region continue to push boundaries and defend their rights. Hana and Natia are two of the visible and courageous examples of this determination.

Women’s achievements in Syria

In Syrian Kurdistan, Rojava, women have also played a decisive role in defeating ISIS, notably during the battles of Raqqa and Kobane. Beyond the battlefield, they have been central to the governance of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) for nearly a decade. Women helped embed gender equality in political and social institutions and supported legal reforms that abolished polygamy, early marriage and certain inequalities in inheritance previously justified through religious interpretations. Under their influence, the co-presidency system – requiring that a man and a woman share political leadership – has become an established principle, not only in Syrian Kurdistan but also within some Kurdish political structures in Turkey.

These achievements are now under serious threat. The Syrian regime launched an offensive this January that resulted in massacres and the occupation of large parts of the Kurdish autonomous region. Nevertheless, women continue to mobilise to protect their political gains. Their vigilance is reinforced by concerns that their institutions may be absorbed into the Syrian governmental system under the agreement reached on 29 January between Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syrian president and a former jihadist, and the Syrian Democratic Forces led by General Mazloum Abdi.

Women’s concerns extend far beyond questions of equality and human rights; they are central to sustainable peacebuilding and long-term security. At a conference held on 2 March at the French Senate in Paris (organised by the Kurdish Institute of Paris), Kurdish journalist Ronahi Hassan from Rojava underscored this urgency, stating: ‘At a time when the region faces renewed instability and extremist threats, the preservation of decentralised governance and institutionalised gender representation is not only a matter of Kurdish rights, but a cornerstone of international security.’

Model of empowerment in Turkey

In Turkey, the Kurdish women’s movement has also made remarkable progress in advancing gender equality, particularly within political and military contexts. Emerging in response to widespread violence, systemic discrimination and the broader dynamics of the conflict with the Turkish state, Kurdish feminists have developed their own model of empowerment, introducing co-leadership systems within political parties and councils, and ensuring that women share decision-making equally with men. In military organisations associated with the feminist movement, women now occupy leadership positions and participate in strategic planning, challenging traditional gender hierarchies and social expectations.

Kurdish women have also confronted deeply rooted feudal and patriarchal norms within their society, promoting women’s autonomy and resisting domestic and community violence. Their initiative has included addressing gaps within the broader Turkish feminist movement, advocating for peace and intersectional approaches that recognise ethnic and political marginalisation. Its influence now extends beyond Kurdistan, inspiring similar initiatives across the wider Middle East (3).

Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement

In Iran, Kurdish women became the driving force behind the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) movement following the killing of the Kurdish student Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022. For many Kurds, this slogan has become a universal call for dignity and freedom. The movement quickly transcended ethnic boundaries within Iran and challenged the authority of the ruling regime, and went on to become a global symbol of resistance and emancipation. Sahar Bagheri, researcher at the IRIS laboratory in Paris, reflects on this struggle in Rojhelat (Kurdistan of Iran) saying: ‘The struggle of Kurdish women is fundamentally feminist, rooted in the defence of our bodily autonomy and our land as inseparable sites of resistance.’ She adds: ‘As Kurdish women, we remain steadfast in our commitment to Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, asserting ourselves as active political subjects. Our resistance challenges both patriarchal domination and colonial power, insisting that women’s liberation is inseparable from collective self-determination.’

The above examples show that Kurds are not ‘separatist militias’ seeking to challenge borders inherited from 20th-century colonial arrangements, as some recent narratives have suggested. On the contrary, they are well organised actors representing a significant potential for democratic progress and building societies grounded in freedom, equality and universal human rights. These principles stand in stark contrast to the ideological extremism and radical Islamist currents that have destabilised much of the Middle East since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nor should Kurds be reduced to a simplistic image of ‘brave warriors’. Instead the international community ought to recognise the values they strive to defend and implement whenever political space allows.

Yanar’s assassination is a stark reminder that democracy remains fragile and that the pursuit of emancipation can provoke new forms of repression and domination. In this context, recognising the strategic importance of women’s struggle for freedom, equality and human dignity is not just a symbolic gesture.Email

Nazand Begikhani

Nazand Begikhani is a poet and Vincent Wright Chair and Lecturer at Sciences Po, Paris.

 

Fertility remains high in rural Tanzania despite access to family planning

YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER...

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

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Families in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to have many children.

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Credit: Aine Seitz McCarthy.

URBANA, Ill. – Fertility rates in much of Sub-Saharan Africa remain high, despite declining child mortality and improved access to contraceptives and female education — factors that generally lead to smaller families and improved economic conditions in developing countries. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at men’s and women’s desired fertility in rural Tanzania, gauging some of the factors that influence how many children they want. 

“This conversation about fertility preferences is very important to the demographic transition of Sub-Saharan Africa. Families may adopt family planning practices in the short term, yet still plan to have more children in the long term, presenting a puzzle for researchers and policy makers,” said corresponding author Catalina Herrera Almanza, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

She co-authored the study with Aine Seitz McCarthy, associate professor of economics at Lewis & Clark College.

“There is evidence that people in poor, rural areas are having large families because they want to, not because they don’t have enough access to contraception. For households that depend on agricultural labor, wanting more children can make economic sense,” McCarthy said. “Men typically want more children than women, but we found that the husband’s preferences can strongly influence their wife’s.”

The researchers evaluated the results of a 15-month family planning program for rural households in Tanzania’s Meatu district, conducted in partnership with the country’s Ministry of Health and the Meatu District Hospital. Local women were trained to provide education on birth spacing, the safety of contraceptives, and free birth control options available from public dispensaries.

The study followed 515 households in 12 villages, randomly assigned to one of three groups: joint consultations for couples, individual consultations for wives only, and a control group. Before and after the program, each spouse was asked privately and separately by a person of their own gender how many additional children they wanted.

Participants were, on average, 37 years old for men and 30 for women, and already had five children. Before the intervention, 89% of women were not using contraception.

“The program triggered the opportunity for these men and women to learn about their spouse’s fertility preferences. Most of them had never talked about it before — about two-thirds of couples had never discussed how many children they wanted,” Herrera Almanza said.

The researchers found that men, on average, wanted 4 more children, while women would like 2.4. However, after participating in the couples consultations, both spouses’ fertility preferences increased. After the joint counseling, husbands desired an additional 0.77 children, while there were no differences for men who did not receive counseling.

Women who participated in joint counseling increased their desired fertility by 1.6 children. In contrast, women in the individual group reported lower desired fertility after the program. Furthermore, women in the couples’ group overestimated their husbands’ desire for more children after the consultations, while this was not the case for the individual group.

The researchers found the results were driven by women in polygamous marriages, which was nearly a third of the sample.

“In polygamy, this can be strategic behavior where women want children because there is no old-age security, and land inheritance follows the sons. A wife with more children might be able to claim more resources,” Herrera Almanza said.

Older women were also more likely to increase their fertility preferences, perhaps reflecting a strategic desire to have as many children as possible while they can.  

The researchers speculated that power imbalances in the relationship might influence the result, causing women to say they want more children simply to appease their husbands.

“This increase in desired additional fertility might seem to be ‘cheap talk’ that may not be backed up by actual desire to increase your fertility. For example, women who are in a domestic violence situation may be fearful and therefore be willing to go along with what their husbands are saying. However, we didn’t find any evidence of that being the case. If anything, women who are more empowered in their household were more likely to increase their fertility preferences,” Herrera Almanza said.

People were overall very responsive to learning about contraceptives, but they want to use them to space their children out, not to have fewer children. 

This is aligned with the policy of Tanzania’s Ministry of Health in Tanzania, which recommends spacing children two years apart to improve the health of both babies and mothers.

Many countries in Africa have a large proportion of young people, and this leads to policy discussions about addressing the demographic dividend by delaying the first birth for young women and men, so they can be more productive. Teen pregnancy is high, which decreases the chances of completing high school, Herrera Almanza explained. 

The study highlights the dichotomy between uptake in contraceptives and preference for large families.

“If the policy goal is to address the women's desired fertility and have healthier birth spacing, then it would make more sense to have joint family planning consultations, but to avoid asking couples about the number of children they want, and allow those discussions to happen more organically,” McCarthy said.

While this study only measured fertility preferences, the researchers are in the process of conducting follow-up interviews with participants, and preliminary results suggest that women are having the children they indicated they would.

The study, “Strategic responses to disparities in spousal desired fertility: experimental evidence from rural Tanzania”, is published in the Journal of Population Economics [DOI: 10.1007/s00148-025-01142-y].

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Journal

Journal of Population Economics

DOI

10.1007/s00148-025-01142-y 

Article Title

Strategic responses to disparities in spousal desired fertility: experimental evidence from rural Tanzania

The Hope of the Future is Still in Rojava

By Rahila Gupta

December 11, 2025

Source: Tribune

The People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) are predominantly-Kurdish armed militias which have played a key role in fighting Islamic State in the Syrian civil war. KURDISHSTRUGGLE/FLICKR/CREATIVE COMMONS

Forged during the Syrian war, Rojava’s experiment in radical self-government offers a lens for examining how the left sustains hope under siege.

How should the progressive left respond to the experiment of Kurdish-led revolutionary Rojava in north-east Syria with its commitment to direct democracy, ecological sustainability, women’s rights and multi-ethnic inclusivity? It is a question that is bound to have plagued anyone who has visited Rojava, for whatever length of time, and come away humbled and impressed by a people swimming against the neoliberal current that has the world in its grips.

I too have grappled with this question. While no simple blueprint can reproduce the revolution elsewhere, I have toyed with more literal possibilities, taking a leaf out of the Kurdish diaspora’s playbook — setting up citizens’ assemblies along the lines of democratic confederalism to deal with local issues, build democratic muscle, and bring about change. Perhaps it could become as effective as the local experiment in Porto Alegre in Brazil once was. Set up in 1989, it received millions in participatory budgeting and redirected services to the most marginalised communities. That seems to be the limit of what can be achieved under neoliberal states; beyond that, political imagination falters, resorting to the idea of preparedness — like the Kurds quietly setting up citizens’ councils under the radar of Assad’s Syria until the Arab Spring in 2011 created a vacuum in the north and east and allowed them to achieve an almost bloodless revolution. Assad was too busy crushing the uprising down south.

Matt Broomfield, who spent three years in Rojava, approaches the question in his own, unique and thoughtful way. He embarks on a deep philosophical and practical engagement with the idea and reality of Rojava to tackle the defeatism of the left following the failure of the workers’ revolution in the twentieth century. He wants to engender that preparedness in what he sees as a disorganised Western anarchist movement weighed down by ‘left melancholy’. He runs through the post-Marxist philosophers who failed to identify a class of people who could be tasked with the job of transforming society, dismissing David Graeber’s ‘99 percent’, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘multitude’, and John Holloway’s ‘rabble’, as too diffuse. He speculates whether this century’s political subject will be the climate migrant. However, it is Öcalan’s identification of women as the vanguard of change — a revolutionary force theorised as the first group of people to be enslaved — that drives the Rojava revolution and has set feminist imagination on fire everywhere.

At the organisational level, Broomfield considers whether the pragmatism of the Kurdish freedom struggle has any lessons to offer the Western Left, particularly the anarchist strand with its purist commitment to horizontalism. In Rojava, they have achieved a ‘novel synthesis: a militant, vertical organisation [which] empowers a communal, horizontal politics.’ The verticalist organisation is a leftover from the Kurdish movement’s Marxist-Leninist roots, which encourages discipline, even hierarchy, while paradoxically facilitating a decentralised challenge to that hierarchy. It is effective in a way that anarchists are not, leaving them open to subversion and co-optation, chaos and malaise.

When the existential battle for the city of Kobane, aggressively besieged by ISIS in 2014, looked in danger of being lost, the Kurds accepted the US coalition’s offer of air-cover, fully aware of the transactional nature of that relationship. This proved to be a decisive turning point in their fortunes. The willingness to sup with the imperialist devil in a desperate bid for survival discredited Rojava among some sections of the left. Similarly, they have engaged with Russia and played off several regional powers against each other, including conservative religious forces in the erstwhile ISIS caliphate. Broomfield commends this ‘respectful, open approach to the very culture it aims to revolutionise’ as a strategy that should be deployed in our own contexts.

Political philosophy is marshalled to buoy up the spirit of activists to stay with the grind of political work through a paean to hope, enriched and informed paradoxically by the very hopelessness of the struggle. Broomfield’s early Christian upbringing made him receptive to the dictum, ‘I believe because it is impossible’. He started the project to see if hope remained possible in the twenty-first century, after the Holocaust, the pandemic, the era of left defeat and in the middle of a climate catastrophe. With the help of mainly Western philosophical, literary and theological commentaries, Broomfield looks for hope that has been wrung out of despair — the only kind that can lend a spine to resistance, where even suicide could be interpreted as an act of hope for a better world. This is not the empty hope of neoliberal ideology, ‘an equal opportunity resource’, where each of us could have a better life if only we set our minds to it. Without wanting to diminish it, the book could even be described as a self-help manual for the aspiring revolutionary.

In an interesting neologism borrowed from the internet, he enumerates the ‘copium’ (a merger of coping and opium) strategies that activists can use to prevent burnout and fatalism and manage doubts and insecurities: a quasi-religious commitment to a revolutionary future; a secular leap of faith towards a socialist utopia; a healthy dose of self-delusion; and a transition from individual self-care to the collective self-care of the Kurdish movement, which discourages individualism.

Broomfield asks: if we can and do deceive ourselves in the service of capitalist hegemony, why not in the service of revolution? It is a striking question. Both require sacrifice and deprivation, and only one offers the prospect of radical change and a possibly glorious future, but the wiles and stratagems of capitalism can lure the best of us into the path of least resistance. Individualism, turbocharged by our neoliberal times, undermines the collective struggle that revolutionary change necessarily entails.

While Broomfield is refreshingly honest about the shortcomings of the Rojava revolution, his view that the compromises that it has had to make in the Arab-majority areas generated ‘the movement’s most revolutionary moments’ is unduly optimistic for a book about hope without hope. Many of the compromises entailed concessions on feminist commitments, including the reversal of a ban on polygamy — a chilling example of democracy trumping women’s rights.

Matt Broomfield’s Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment is published by AK Press.

 

Humans rank between meerkats and beavers in monogamy ‘league table’

University of Cambridge

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Humans are far closer to meerkats and beavers for levels of exclusive mating than we are to most of our primate cousins, according to a new University of Cambridge study that includes a table ranking monogamy rates in various species of mammal.

Previous evolutionary research has used fossil records and anthropological fieldwork to infer human sexual selection. While in other species, researchers have conducted long-term observations of animal societies and used paternity tests to study mating systems.

Now, a new approach by Dr Mark Dyble from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology analyses the proportions of full versus half-siblings in a host of species, as well as several human populations throughout history, as a measure for monogamy.

Species and societies with higher levels of monogamy are likely to produce more siblings that share both parents, says Dyble, while those with more polygamous or promiscuous mating patterns are likely to see more half-siblings.

He devised a computational model that maps sibling data collected from recent genetic studies onto known reproductive strategies to calculate an estimated monogamy rating.

While still a rough guide, Dyble argues this is a more direct and concrete way to gauge patterns of monogamy than many previous methods when looking at a spectrum of species, and human societies over thousands of years.    

“There is a premier league of monogamy, in which humans sit comfortably, while the vast majority of other mammals take a far more promiscuous approach to mating,” said Dyble, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Cambridge.

“The finding that human rates of full siblings overlap with the range seen in socially monogamous mammals lends further weight to the view that monogamy is the dominant mating pattern for our species.”

The question of human monogamy has been debated for centuries. It has long been hypothesised that monogamy is a cornerstone of the social cooperation that allowed humans to dominate the planet.

However, anthropologists find a wide range of mating norms among humans. For example, previous research shows that 85% of pre-industrial societies permitted polygynous marriage – where a man is married to several women at the same time.

To calculate human monogamy rates, Dyble used genetic data from archaeological sites, including Bronze Age burial grounds in Europe and Neolithic sites in Anatolia, and ethnographic data from 94 human societies around the world: from Tanzanian hunter-gatherers the Hadza, to the rice-farming Toraja of Indonesia.

“There is a huge amount of cross-cultural diversity in human mating and marriage practices, but even the extremes of the spectrum still sit above what we see in most non-monogamous species,” said Dyble.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, has humans at an overall 66% rate for full siblings, placing us seventh of eleven species in the study considered socially monogamous and preferring long-term pair bonds.

Meerkats come in at a 60% full sibling rate while beavers just beat humans for monogamy with a 73% rate. As with humans, this suggests a significant trend towards monogamy for these species, but with a solid amount of flexibility.

The white-handed gibbon comes closest to humans in the study, with a monogamy rate of 63.5%. It’s the only other top-ranked “monotocous” species, meaning it usually has one offspring per pregnancy, unlike the litters had by other monogamous mammals.

The only other non-human primate in the top division is the moustached tamarin: a small Amazonian monkey that typically produces twins or triplets, and has a full sibling rate of almost 78%.   

All other primates in the study are known to have either polygynous or polygynandrous (where both males and females have multiple partners) mating systems, and rank way down the monogamy table.  

Mountain gorillas manage a 6% full sibling rate, while chimpanzees come in at just 4% – on a par with dolphins. Various macaque species, from Japanese (2.3%) to Rhesus (1%), sit almost at the bottom of the table.

“Based on the mating patterns of our closest living relatives, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, human monogamy probably evolved from non-monogamous group living, a transition that is highly unusual among mammals,” said Dyble.  

Among the few with a similar evolutionary shift are species of wolf and fox, which have a degree of social monogamy and cooperative care, whereas the ancestral canid was likely to have been group-living and polygynous.

The Grey Wolf and Red Fox sneak into the upper league with full sibling rates of almost half (46% and 45% respectively), while African species have much higher rates: the Ethiopian wolf comes in at 76.5%, and the African Wild dog is ranked second for monogamy with a rating of 85%.

Top of the table is the California deermouse that stays paired for life once mated, with a 100% rating. Ranked bottom is Scotland’s Soay sheep, with 0.6% full siblings, as each ewe mates with several rams.

“Almost all other monogamous mammals either live in tight family units of just a breeding pair and their offspring, or in groups where only one female breeds,” said Dyble. “Whereas humans live in strong social groups in which multiple females have children.”

The only other mammal believed to live in a stable, mixed-sex, multi-adult group with several exclusive pair bonds is a large rabbit-like rodent called the Patagonian mara, which inhabits warrens containing a number of long-term couples. 

Dyble added: “This study measures reproductive monogamy rather than sexual behaviour. In most mammals, mating and reproduction are tightly linked. In humans, birth control methods and cultural practices break that link.”

“Humans have a range of partnerships that create conditions for a mix of full and half-siblings with strong parental investment, from serial monogamy to stable polygamy.”

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Journal

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2025.2163 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Article Title

Human monogamy in mammalian context

Article Publication Date

10-Dec-2025