10/28/19
For the women who have given more than five years of their lives and lost close to 1,000 of their friends to the fight against the Islamic State, the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi meant a great deal — and marked a truly historic moment. “I feel that this means we could do something for women around the world,” said Nowruz Ahmed, the head of the all-women’s People’s Protection Force, or YPJ, in a Sunday phone call. The all-women’s force formed a key component of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, who fought ISIS from the ground while the U.S. led from the air and served as advise-and-assist partners. Nowruz and I have spoken several times before, in a series of several-hour-long interviews for a book I am writing. This was the first time we had spoken since Turkey attacked her forces and created chaos from a region that had enjoyed a fragile, but real, stability that I had seen for myself in regular trips to the area. Nowruz, who led Rojda against ISIS in the 2014 battle for Kobani, and for years afterward, told me she felt thrilled to know Baghdadi was dead. “We knew of this operation and worked on it quite a lot,” Nowruz said, of the secret U.S. special operations forces mission to find Baghdadi on Saturday. No hint of the extraordinary hung in her voice, she was simply acknowledging that this operation had been one of so many in which they had taken part with the United States. “This is a great victory for all the women around the world, because the people who were suffering the most from the ISIS ideology and mentality were women.”
Over the past two years I have met with so many of the women who led the battle against the Islamic State, first on their own and then alongside the Americans following Kobani, which was ISIS’s first battlefield defeat. Americans who led the ISIS fight from the air and as advisors have spoken to me about the deep respect they have for these women, describing them as “warriors.” she also acknowledged the grim reality the Kurds now face, as they confront Russia imposing a deal with Turkey agreed to in Sochi, and the inescapable realty that Turkey will attack the Kurds again if they don’t submit to its conditions. As she put it to me, the Kurds have no other options at the moment. More than 15 women have died since Turkey’s offensive against the Kurds began two weeks ago. Turkish-backed forces released a video showing their capture of one of the YPJ fighters. Another video shows Turkish-backed forces calling a dead YPJ fighter a “whore.” “We have been fighting ISIS for seven years, and we were trying to build community in the newly liberated areas,” she said. “We tried to create a strong society and for all the people who lived under ISIS control, including religious minorities and all the ethnic groups.” Then came Turkey’s attack, which has sent all that fragile stability into a 52-card-pick up everyone on the ground is struggling to understand and to divine how to make right so that they can go back to battling ISIS instead of defending their families. “Killing al-Baghdadi, we hope that we can remove this mentality in the region,” Nowruz said. “We will continue our resistance and our struggle against these people and these ideas.”
