Grandma Law And Revolutionary Sacrifice

friendly and pro social. There are the names of various Shihid's martyrs who died fighting for Rojava, brightly colored recycling symbols, and cozy cartoon illustrations of women with a K forty seven's but alone among the ruins of Rojava. Kamish Loo is not entirely under the control of the SDF. The Syrian regime and its blood soaked dictator Bashar al Assad still run a few square blocks of the city, along

with its military airport. The result of this is that every so often you turn a corner in Komischlow and run face to face into a gigantic portrait of Bashar. The regime. Bits of town are walled off, protected by razor wire and surly looking young male soldiers with kalashnikovs. A few days before our arrival, an American tourist was kidnapped by regime soldiers. Here. The full story of this that comes out later is profoundly dumb. Sam Goodwin, aged thirty,

was trying to visit every country in the world. The Syrian regime, of course, would not approve his visa, so he hired our friend Sangar to get him approval to cross the Iraqi border into Rojava. Once in Rojava, Sam planned to head to Kamichlo so he could step briefly into the regime controlled side of town. Sangar told him that this was a terrible idea, and also told him that if he was going to safely visit Kamischlow, he really needed a local Kurdish fixer to show him around

there too. It was easy to accidentally why end up in the wrong part of town and thus get arrested by the regime. But Sam decided he knew best. He didn't have much money, so he decided he wouldn't have a fixer once he reached Rojava. This was safe enough until he got to Kamischlow, and he decided to execute his cunning plan he checked into the Aja Hotel two A's, which is where most foreigners stay, and then he hit

the ground and scoped out a regime checkpoint. Sam's plan, it seems, was to hop across into regime territory and then run back over into Rojava very quickly. Only he wasn't quite as fast as he needed to be, and so when Jake and I checked into the Aja Hotel on the night of July, Sam sat in a prison cell somewhere nearby in regime controlled Syria. His fate at that moment was uncertain, although he's since been freed, and

it lingered in our minds. Our nerves were not helped by the ten minute speech Kobat and our hotel's manager gave us on which parts of town were actually safe to visit and which parts of town get us arrested like Sam. The key, they explained, was just to avoid wandering too close to the regime parts of town. Large chunks of the city, they assured us, were totally safe. It was just that foreigners had a nasty tendency to

funk up in the unfamiliar environs. Now, neither Jake nor I wanted to spend a lot of time out on the street. Given all the reasons, I just laid out. But we were hungry, and so we ventured out for schwarma and for some beer from me. We were about ten feet from the door of our hotel when a technical a flatbed truck with a giant gun melted in

the bed, farted into view. When a cloud of exhausted wheels to stop just a few feet ahead of us, smack in the middle of an intersection, two WYPG men hopped out from the bed of the truck, a K forty seven's in hand. They took up positions on either side of the street and began searching vehicles and questioning people.

They did not seem overly aggressive or frightened, but they did seem very serious, and the mood on the street turned icy and weird in a way that's hard to describe to people who haven't watched roving pat rolls of armed men search for suicide bombers. That is what the hPG we're looking for. That afternoon, Kamischla was large, and it's chaotic enough. That isis sleeper cells have had an easier time operating there than in most parts of Rajava.

There had been suicide bombings earlier in the year. Jake and I gave the whole scene a wide berth as we walked past and on to our destination, a little hole in the wall Shwarma Joint. We ate, and then we set out to find a beer store. We were maybe half a block into that mission when a young man on a motorcycle burned right past the air SATs checkpoint and up to Jake and I. We both tensed up. I wouldn't say I've been close to a suicide bomb detonating, but I have been closer than I wanted to be.

Jake and I never talked about this, but I kind of gathered from his reaction that he'd had a similar experience, and so we were both rather jumpy at this. But the kid just topped off his bike and breeze passed us into a shop. We relaxed, but we also decided it was probably a good idea at a high tail it back to our hotel rooms. We did not go back out into Kamichelo alone again. We made it through the night, though, and we awoke the next morning to

an even tenser mood. The commander of Sincom United States Central Command had just flown into Rojava's capital, Kobani to meet with the leadership of the SDF. Rojava's military security was correspondingly tightened. Kabat and Alan picked Jake and I up that morning, and as soon as we got out on the road the additional a Sayish patrols were very obvious. That's not the only reason things felt tense, though. The reason that the head of Sentcom had flown to Rojava

was to discuss the so called Turkish buffer Zone. President Erdowin wanted the United States to force the SDF to withdraw from all of the areas immediately around a Turkey's border, but a lot of northeast Syria is bordered by Turkey, including most of the defensive fortifications and tunnels that would give Rojava a hope of defending itself against NATO's second largest military. As we ate breakfast, the news dropped that an individual in Rojava had fired a small rocket into Turkey.

No one was hurt and the STF arrest at the culprit, but it did not seem to bode well for future peace. Moments later, scanning my phone, I came across another piece of breaking news. Iran had just announced its arrest of seventeen people it called CIA Operatives. I began to feel as if Jake and I might be standing on the edge of some yawning, terrible chasm, and so I elected to set down my phone. This proved to be a

wise decision. My mood improved immensely as we got out of Commissil and on the road to our next destination. Today we were headed to a woman's cooperative farm out in the countryside near a town called Trebespie. The farmer is one of several co ops training up a new generation of female farmers. As a law tour across the landscape, he began to play as one of his favorite songs, Destane Kobani that means long Live Rojava, We are ready to die for you. The attacks of the enemy are

in vain. Revolutionary men and women are defending the homeland without fear of barbaric dogs. You get the idea. It's pretty standard militant stuff, but there's a pretty sweet breakdown at the halfway point. Jake and I like it, and it gets us to thinking about our favorite Irish rebel songs. A lot of Jake's family came from Ireland, so he grew up listening to the stuff. I don't have any Irish blood at all, but for whatever reason, I fell in love with old ira A anthems when I was

in high school. We decided to play one of them for Kabbat, and there's no question among us as to which song it should be. Come out and fight me like a major, like Calabey from The Green Lovely Day, This is come out Ye Black and Tans, a classic tune about a drunk Irish partisan taunting members of a British military unit. The notoriously violent Black and Hands. The

defiance of the song appears to Kabbat. She asks us if we've heard Sia Madonni's cover of Bella Chow Jake has, but I haven't, and she plays it fish Son the Stars Chocho. In response, Jake and I put on another one of our favorite i RA songs, Home Soldiers, go on home, have you done looking homes? Or rad under jeers and will fight you for ray. Kabat likes that one a lot. She spent most of her life with foreign soldiers occupying her homeland or threatening to occupy it

Syrians from regime controlled territory Russians, Americans, Turks. Kabat identifies deeply with the sentimentic spressed in this song, and she laughs a lot during it. We have to stop by the nearby Asaish or Military police office to get more paper stamped and inspected. We drive into a walled complex of buildings with a large friendly poster of Apo up de Lagelon, the founder of Rojaba, wearing his Cosby sweater

and smiling. It's displayed prominently out front. The process takes a little while, and while we wait, how About starts a conversation with one of the cops in the office with us. She asks him a variant of the same question I've had her asking a number of the men. The gist of the question is do you find working with women to be weird? Did you used to feel differently about their place in society? Is this strange at all for you? And this guy insists that it's never

been an issue for him. Then he shoots back a question to Jake. Are women allowed to serve in frontline combat units in the British military? Jake tells him yes, but only recently, because for a long time people thought women could not do those jobs. I tell him the things are more or less the same over in the United States. The asaish man regards this as ridiculous. He tells us our daughters they defeated isis So there is

the proof. We get our permission to move on, and before long we're rolling up the dirt road leading to the women's cooperative Farming Commune. It's a sizeable endeavor, more than two dozen acres under cultivation and a complex of a dozen greenhouses, each the size of two eighteen wheelers park next to each other. Alan stops the van and we get out and meet a middle aged man outside a pair of trailers that seemed to function as an

office space. He introduces himself as haveal ken War and explains that he's an agricultural engineer and that he acts as an adviser to the young women who live in work here. He takes us into the trailers and he leads us to a small classroom with YPG and J flags in one corner and a desk with a computer and an a K forty seven lint against it. Two young women sit in a low slung couch at the other end of the room. They could have walked out

of downtown Los Angeles. Both war jenes, sneakers and colorful t shirts. Ahim has dark glasses, a head scarf, and presents with an overwhelming air of shyness. Her partner, Salam is her polar opposite, with a penetrating gaze and a wide, toothy and thoroughly winsome smile. Both young women are the elected representatives of the commune, chosen by their fellows to represent the group at local council meetings and in the

instances when foreign journalists rolled through town. They both looked very young to be taking on leadership roles and an endeavor as large as this farm. When we arrived, there were enough crops on the ground to fill a couple of large trucks. My first question for a human Salam as if before the revolution they had ever thought they might end up leading a project like this. Kabbat asks them for me that tutting noise was Salam saying no in a way that translated very clearly to everyone in

the room, even if it didn't quite translate over my recording. No, we never thought the world could be like this, I asked her when she first realized that the world had changed, and that women in her society suddenly had more options. The memory was clear to her. She was sitting with a group of friends shortly after the start of the revolution, and as they began to talk about the changes happening to their society, an avalanche of buried desires began to

bubble up from within them. We were young, and we wanted to study. One of us said I want to be a doctor, and I said, I want to study economics. Salam and her friends went to the women's house that had been newly established in their town. When this place was set up, our neighbors and other people in the community talked about it. Salam came from a fairly traditional Arab village, and it was not the norm for women and her family to have careers or to even really

live independently before marriage. I asked her if her family made things more difficult for her when she announced that she wanted to do this work. The sound she made wasn't picked up perfectly by my little handheld audio recorder. I will try to recreate it as best as I can on my own. The sound only conveys half of her message. The other half was on her wide open

eyes and cheerfully traumatized grin. It's the kind of look you see on your friend's faces when they were called the times their parents caught them out drinking underage, or sneaking out to visit a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or doing something else that caused their parents to blow up in a huge way. Announcing that she planned to leave home was clearly not a pleasant memory, but her family weren't able to make her stop either. Perhaps it's true that our work was men's work before, but now it

is women's work. We said, yes, we will work like the men, and we put in long hours here to do so. After a period of study, Salama sided that her interest in economics would be best served by helping to start and operate a business. Her training for this involved classroom lessons and practical training and agriculture, but it also included the same month of ideological and armed training required of new recruits who joined the militias of the SDF.

We had classes about ancient history starting with the Big Bang, classes on Abdullah Alan, on ethics, on how we should relate to others in our community. We had many classes, including education on economics. They also learned how to use a gun. Basic arm training is considered a critical skill for just about everybody who takes any sort of real role in Rojava. Did remember what she thought the first time that she had the first time that she fired a weather it was scary up until the first bullet

I fired. My hand was shaking and the comrade had to help me. But the second time I fired it. I also asked what was probably a more important question, how had it felt the first time she was able to eat crops that she'd helped grow herself. It was hard work, but we enjoyed it when the crops were finally ready. The cucumbers finished first, We liked them a lot. The harvest was difficult, but after we had everything gathered, we were so happy. Now you can see our fields here.

They're so big, and it took a lot of effort to make them this way. Days spent under the sun, irritated by the heat, but once we had that food in our hands, we forgot our discomfort. After we conclude our interview, Salamin Aheim take us on a tour of their farm. We pass a man cutting up metal segments of fencing while a female apprentice observes. We pass a fertile field filled with row after row of cucumbers, cantaloupes,

and zucchini. I'm not an expert on agriculture, but I've spent a decent chunk of my life on small farms in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Oregon. It is clear to me that this is not a tiny token endeavor. There is an enormous amount of food on the ground, a lot of thick, flavorful cucumbers with an almost media richness to them that's entirely absent from the ones I've back in the United States. We eat them while we walk.

The pastoral charm of the field is broken by the enormous oil refinery that dominates the horizon in the distance. Rojava holds a number of very rich oil fields which provide a significant amount of serious total oil output. The refinery ahead of US doubles as a base for US troops in the region. Oil production definitely does not jell well with the ecology balance bits of the Rojavan constitution,

but selling it represents a pragmatic necessity. There are taxes in Rojava, but this is not a wealthy region of the world. War is expensive without oil sales the STFs position would be even less secure. A great deal has been written about the oil refineries of northeast Syria. A few months before my own arrival in Rojava, a reporter with Mother Jones named Shane Bauer published a massive long

form article about his own experiences in the region. Rujava's oil refineries and the role of US played in securing them were a major focus of his story. Bauer was critical of the Rojavan Project, and he spends relatively little time discussing economic cooperatives like the farm Moron. He writes of them, quote, These profit sharing ventures are subsidized with interest free loans, but their role in the economy is

relatively marginal. There are just a hundred and twenty nine cooperatives in Jazeera, which is one of the cantons in Rojava. Their goods are bought and sold on the free market. The question of whether or not these cooperatives really matter in the big picture is a debatable point, to be sure, but it's worth noting that none of those one d and twenty nine cooperatives existed prior to the revolution, and there are more cooperatives in the other cantons of Rojava.

Fifty five of these co ops are all women endeavors. Like the restaurant we ate at in Darek and Salam and Ahms Farm, these employ more than seven thousand women. It feels significant to me that something of this scale has been accomplished while the people of Rojava have also fought an expensive, grinding war with ISIS. And it feels significant to me when we step into the large complex of greenhouses on Salam and Ahims Farm. Yeah. Here we see on one end of the very large greenhouse space.

There's no internal walls between them group six women, all masks, cutting down plants. Watching these young women chopped down old vines, remnants of the last harvest to clear up space free planting pulls my mind back to California and the medical marijuana farms that I spent a sizeable chunk of the late Oughts living in and around. Perhaps Shane is right, and everything happening here is an insignificant side show, but it doesn't feel that way standing in the middle of it.

We eat a cantaloupe before we leave. Like most right thinking people, I've spent most of my life considering cantaloupe to be among the very worst fruits. I find it dull and flavorless, and I've always sort of assumed that its main purpose was to be an inexpensive way to fill out the weight of cafeteria fruit salad. I don't know if it's something in the soil or just the fact that I've never had a farm fresh cantaloup before, but it tastes incredible here, so much sweeter than i'd expected.

Bellies full, We bet our hosts farewell and drive to Turbespi, a large town of about sixteen thousand. I want to get a sense of how men on the street feel about the changes to women's rights here since the revolution. We haven't heard from many men who are just normal civilians, not involved in any of the militias or political parties

that make up Rojava. One allegation you'll hear from people who are critical of Rojava is the idea that the main political party in the region, the p y D, has basically dressed up their authoritarian rule as a democratic revolution. The p y D or Democratic Union Party, was founded in two thousand three. Shane Bauer of Mother Jones brings up the case of Burzan Leani, a Kurdish journalist who was imprisoned for six months in two thousand seventeen under

charges of being part of an unapproved media organization. Forty five days of a sentence were held in solitary confinement. Leoni is affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria or k DPS, a political party that many Syrian Curds say is just a wing of the Barzani family's empire of influence. Since the KDPS is a party for herds and for Kords alone, it is legal in Rojava. Under the constitution, political parties may not be found out on

ethnic or religious lines. The Self Administration basically accuses Leani of being a spy in Rojava there to drum up unrest and resistance. Leoni denies this, and neither I nor Shane Bauer have any way of knowing what the truth here is. The best I can do with the resources available to me now is to try and gain an understanding of how free people in Rojava feel to express their feelings towards the p y D and the Self Administration. We park on a random street and Kabat approaches the

first passer by. We meet a short, middle aged Arab man on his way to the market. We say our greetings, and then I start in questions, what do you think about the changes that have been made since the revolution? His answer to the second question is a bit more winding, but it's also broadly positive. Day said was just a woman who are educated, our functioning in the jobs as as well the women the men that they were like, I just have education for people like me alerted they

didn't work, they were just always farmers. That might have been a little hard to follow. This guy was saying that back when ASSAD was in charge, only wealthy, educated women were able to hold any kind of job. They have always been liberated working women in Syria, but until the revolution they were primarily wealthy, generally from coastal cities, and generally benefiting from some sort of direct connection to

the ASSAD regime. This guy expressed his opinion that now working class women had opportunities, and he felt this was a good thing. We approach another passer by a reedy young man who expresses a more critical opinion of the self administration. He praises the security, but he complains that some of the dishonest, corrupt officials who ran things under ASSAD were still around, and we're still dishonest, but the people who are already before the revolution have a problems

with their like attitude or corruption. Kabat asks him next how he feels about, you know, the fact that women can do stuff here now, none of us. We'll hear variations of this joke several times today, and many times throughout our time in Rojava, as you can hear. Jake and I both laughed when we heard it the first time, but it grew a little bit less funny every time someone repeated it. I couldn't help but think that some of the men back at home in my own country

who complain about the feminist movement oppressing American men. This feels much less aggressive than the men's rights movement, for instance. But it's certainly not all lighthearted jokes either. Many men in Rojava feel that what you and I would call legal equality is in reality women being placed over men. It's not exactly a new story in the history of civil rights movements. After a handful of interviews, we find ourselves talking to a tall, heavy set man in a thobe,

the traditional Arab dressing gown. Kbat asks him how he feels about the changes to women's rights after the revolution. There have been great successes. Next, she asks him, before a woman could not pick up a gun or go to work, how do you feel about the fact that this has changed. I think it's very good that now women can take up the gun. Before women lived under violence. Now after the revolution, they have had chances. They have had their freedom. Before they weren't free, they couldn't speak.

Now they can work, they can speak. There is an improvement. Next, she asks him if he feels the self administration government has treated his people Arabs any differently than Kurds. No, there's no difference. We are all one. It doesn't matter here if you're Arab, Kurdish Christian. We are all brothers from this revolution who rose up together as one. We continue down the street, talking to Arab and Kurdish men of all ages about their feelings towards the new system.

Most people are broadly positive, particularly about the security situation, but also generally out the new opportunities for women. After an hour or so, we find ourselves in a vegetable market talking to the owner of a small shop. He's the first man, we think who is emphatically against the changes made by the Rojavan Revolution. Okay, so he is not with this system of the woman. He feels like it's too much or it's over Why because he already have one wife and he wanted to get a second wife.

But he's a friend. Do you not saying now a lot that it's not allowed to get a second wife. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this fellow's complaints, but I am happy that he felt perfectly comfortable voicing them at length to foreign journalists because he don't have a children from the first one, so you have a reason for

the second. But even that, I certainly can't say that the members of the p whitey Rojava's largest political party, or any other officials involved in its governance, have never targeted or oppressed individuals with political differences. That statement would

not even be true of my own country. But I can't say that this man on the street, talking to a foreigner with a clear and visible record device, felt fine voicing his criticisms of the system, and that same thing would not have happened and Bashar al Assad, Syria. At the very least, we finished our time on the street, and after a couple of terrible, terrible cigarettes with a lawn which we enjoyed very much. Thank you. Alan. We hop in the van and roll off back to Kamisch.

Lookbat and I start talking about her feelings towards the interview, Um, how did you feel about the running joke about the women being in charge of everything? Now? Yeah, I accepted. I even sometimes expect like a more harsh comments. You know, I know deeply they are many of them don't like it at all. They don't believe it at all. They and even sometimes I feel like if it came again their control, if this system has been done, the woman will be like the U is losing this because maybe

they were going to take revenge again. Yeah, which of those guys, like some of them were clearly she's like a gay in the vegetable card seemed to be having a laugh about it. Do you feel some of them were or maybe he was. I think, yeah, this division because the other one and he said, like it's strong system and like I want to because he wanted to just get another wife because of the kid. He have

a reason why he's criticizing this system. But the other one he's clear like don't like it at all, and he's like even make fun on it, Like yeah, they were going to take us to a whole somehow. Our whole is the open air prison slash refugee camp or isis prisoners are help interesting, yeah, because that's the first time in their life, like never they imagine they have been right up. Like the woman, she's basically an Arab culture that they want. She cannot do anything, She's just

a housewife, maximum for home at fellows. So now it's another thing. It's so difficult for them to accept it. Even they said by their eyes they feel like it s will be changed. She means they all hope will go back to the way it was before, and perhaps it will. As we drive past yet another towering stretch of the Turkish border fence, I can't help but think about how suddenly this could all end. Our last stop for the day is a residential neighborhood and Kabbat's hometown,

kamisch Loo. We're going there to meet the members of one of the local women's councils. This council represented the women in the neighborhood and met regularly with them to vote on how to handle specific hyperlocal problems. Since all of the women in it were older and grandmother's Hobbat referred to them collectively as the Mamas, and introducing us to them was clearly the most excited she'd been in the three or four days since I had known her. So,

what they are doing, they are like organizing. They cannot read all right, it's one of them. They have a smartphone. What they are doing They just sent the or share voice messages together in order to organize for our meeting, gore or gathering. Go. You know, they are discussing the cases or issues together. So you see it's one of them. She's hundling and get cooking in one this thing. Just run,

She's just show me. So it's so funny. Alon glided his van to a stop in front of a nondescript tan colored building at the end of a working class neighborhood and commischelow. We headed in through the open gate of a courtyard, and inside we met the mamas. There are six of them, and the youngest looks to be in her late forties or early fifties. They all wear head scarfs and dressed traditionally no exposed tattoos. Here a

gaggle of young kids scamper around doing kid things. There are no opo pictures on the walls, nor any hanging pictures of martyrs. A circle of plastic chairs sits out in the courtyard and we all take a seat, with a bot in between Jake and I to facilitate the interviews. She introduces the co presidents of the Women's Council, one of whom is also the co president of the larger

local commune. And it's here that I should probably give you another brief overview of how Rojava's democratic confederalist system works. On the ground level, every neighborhood, which is in this case about a hundred and eighty house, has a local commune made up of all the adult members of that neighborhood.

They elect co presidents which represent that commune and the People's Council for their district, and the People's Council elects co presidents to represent that district at the city council. And you know, so on. Co presidents are elected by simple democratic vote, and they are recallable through the same mechanism.

The higher level councils are responsible for the kind of coordination necessary for handling life in large urban areas, but the root of all governance in Rojava are the local communes. They're responsible for hyper local maintenance tasks, basic security, and the distribution of many social welfare programs. They also act a little bit like a d MV, supplying people with stamps and papers they need to do official stuff. The women's councils run as auxiliaries to the local communes as

well as to the larger people's councils. They have veto power over every women's issue decided in the area and can thus stop the mixed gender local communes from ruling on issues of domestic violence or women's healthcare should they disagree with the ruling. All these different communes and councils are further broken down into committees which handles specific issues

for their community. The mamas were meeting with today are the Social Committee for the Women's Council of one local commune in Commissilow, and as they explained to me, their job is to act as a sort of emotional police force. The SA the military police don't show up to deal

with domestic violence or a fist fight between neighbors. The belief is that getting the police involved is bringing outsiders and to solve which should be a community issue, so instead When problems like that crop up, the first responders are often the mama's. As we sit and talk, the mom must tell us the story of a recent domestic dispute they had to handle. He went to fix that problem between a couple the way she is in her parts in home since the month, because they like the

has was getting here. So they went there and they wanted to solve this problem. And then they listened to the why then she had too, and she said, it's maybe she is not saying the genuine plan. Let's listen to the other side as because she said like a now. Also sometimes the woman they out of pressing. In short, what they initially thought was a simple case of domestic violence turned out to be a more complicated dispute between

a married couple. The mamas grew concerned that the woman in this case may have been distorting or fabricating some of the claim she was making against her husband. Unfortunately, like have been oppressed, and there is sometimes the at a tap of revenge, so let's not you know, we get powers or try because I do want also alerted than they have. They don't know how to handle all this to whatever. So sometimes the woman also they are not always right. The conclusion the mamas came to was

that both parties had valid reasons to be angry. They talked things out with both and they helped them reach a place where they could apologize to each other and move back in together. This would be an example of a fairly light case for the social counsel, but they also dealt with more severe issues than quarreling spouses, issues like the fallout after a murder ten days ago. There there is a case like a murder case since sport is, it's there, but no one can sol But you know,

now I can hear the true crime. Fans in the audience getting excited, but interestingly enough. When Hubbart said the murder was unsolved, she didn't mean that the killer was unknown. In fact, the murder had been caught very quickly, tried, convicted, and imprisoned shortly after the crime itself. What hadn't been solved was how to reintegrate the families of the victim and the murderer back into civil society. It's so his wife have been the mother of this son and his sister.

They are not accepting to solve this problem. She said that the immediate family of the dead boy refused to accept peace. When are we're going to kill that joke? Okay? Anyhow, they keep the children and then you kicked this and so his wife out and whenever the woman or anyone wanted to try to fix this problem, they said, no, I'm gonna kill blood. Revenge killing is an extremely common

problem in many parts of the Middle East. The specifics differ from region to region, but the basic idea is that it's still pretty normal for members of families and try as to revenge murder in response to the death of a loved one. I found an interview with a young Egyptian man, Joseph Nazir, on a website called Connect the Cultures dot Com. He described her revenge killings can

often turn into all out war between families. Quote. When I was a child, five or six years old, there was a war like this between two families in our street. My little sister and I were inside our home with our mom when it started. My dad wasn't there, he was working. There was a fight going on outside our door. Families were shooting at each other. I was sitting with my mom inside the house, scared. There were a lot of guns. The shooting went on for about an hour

or two. One person died in this gunfight, and per local custom, his family were unable to hold a proper funeral until one of them had killed a member of the other family, and that family would be unable to do their funeral until they committed another murder, and so on and so forth. You get the idea, and as Joseph explained in his article, there's only one way to end. As such, a cycle of violence quote revenge killings can go on for a long long time, decades and decades.

It doesn't stop until someone in one of the families wants to stop and agrees to go through a ceremony to officially halt the killings. This is the only thing that can stop it. Other than that it will never stop at all. Now. The ceremony, Joseph refers, who involves one man from one of the families marching over to the home of the enemy family, lying down in front of the man of the house, and saying some variant of I'm dead, I'm yours. You can do whatever you

want with me. Now. The man who does this is generally never killed, but it is considered deeply shameful for him to take this action, and so, in other words, the cycle of violence can't end traditionally unless a young man is willing to sacrifice his pride and honor to stop the blood letting. They've taken the responsibility out of the hands of individual family members and put it into

the hands of other members of the community. In this particular case, it took weeks of work by members of the social Committee and members of several other communes in the city. Eventually they got both families to agree to the terms by which they would make a peace. The next step was to host a gigantic feast attended by members of the community and by both families. There they would publicly make peace that way of one side or the other. The truth, all of the neighbors would know

which family was going back on their word of honor. Now, convincing both sides to reach a place of agreement was not easy. The mam has told us of another story about a murder committed by several members of the whitepg against one of their comrades. It looked like so it's like one of them having in the other. Okay, brother was the pin because he's in love with his sister so what he done, he proped he and another three

of his friends. They told now, I feel like I should also jett in here to say that if the self administration were secretly authoritarian, they probably wouldn't let foreign journalists here about murders within their own military units. What happened the families of those for four youngs likely because of the family to get so the white PG caught and prosecuted the murderers. But the families of those murderers had to their homes because they were terrified they'd be

murdered in retaliation. This is the point at which the mama stepped in. So this solution, it was that the guy, he's already the killers and in this jail and the present and they get you dissolution that the families for families, they were going to turn back to their to their houses. But three of them they already announced that they don't consider that this sons. They are sons. Eyning Kabat is explaining that the social counsels were able to convince the

families of the killers to disown their sons. This placated the family of the victim and allowed everyone to return to their homes without further bloodshed. The mamas were pretty emphatic that they could not solve every problem that came their way. For one thing, none of them could read, and they freely admitted that some issues exceeded their depth. These problems could be escalated up to the educated ladies at the women's house, or up to the professional courts

in the very most extreme cases. People in Rojava still have the option of dealing with certain problems and what ME America would call the normal way with cops and judges and lawyers, but they prefer not to start there with any of these groups or steps. One of the foundational ideas of democratic and federalism is that the folks who live in an area are generally better at managing

their lives than the people outside it. Bringing a bunch of cops from fifteen miles away into a domestic dispute is often a lot less effective than having a group of older women everyone knows in respects rolling to investigate and talk things out like just about everyone else we speak with. The mom as have also trained in using their a K forty sevens during times of heightened tension. They take direct responsibility for the security of their neighborhoods,

and they take this work seriously. It's not hard to see why. The co president of the commune tells me about her son, who died in an ambush conducted by ISIS during the darkest days of the war, when the SDF was losing forty fighters every day. Am Chad, you could have it, she plays as a music video made a tribute to her martyred boy. The pride is obvious in her eyes. She explains to us that her work on the Social Council and in her local commune is

part of how she honors her child sacrifice. The more we talk, it becomes clear that all these women have lost children and other family members battling against ISIS, and rather than yielding to their rage and pain, they decided to throw their lives into building something. At one point, I ask if she can imagine things going back to the way they were before the revolution. She immediately tells me that such a thing is unimaginable. System because youth,

because of imaginal names. For example, of minding it's a Cristan. But on the idea they they were just a Cristan, you know. Just to to change it, Tom for the Kurdish name, so we couldn't even speak it away. It was optional, I guess us. We couldn't excution, we couldn't do anything, so we cannot even imagine. Then, as we leave, the co president hands me a little plastic token with the face of her martyred boy on it. For the first time in my life, I'm glad I can't speak

fluent Kurdish. It's much easier to just thank her, take her hand, and meet her gaze without another word. As we pile into the van, Kobat points out the little plastic memorial in my hand. She tells me, you can see where they get the morale to keep going. If they stop, then they're just grieving. We drive off, and Jake and I burned down another god awful cigarette with the lawn, but we mull over the day's findings. It's late and the sun is beginning to set, but we're

not quite done yet. Kabat has one last stop for us to make. Our prior stops on this trip had all been places in groups. Jake and I told Kobat we wanted to visit. We'd read about women's cooperatives and local councils and Judgemina and genoir. Before we ever arrived, we informed Kabat where we wanted to go and we wanted to meet, and she worked out the logistics and got the permissions. But this last stop of the day was the first destination that Harbat had picked herself for us.

The Cemetery of the Martyrs in Kamischlo is one of the places where Rojava buries its war dead, the Shahids. From the outside, it's a large stone facility with a gathering field to one side and long rows of orderly graves on the other. As we stepped through the gates following Kabat, I turned on my recorder to capture the moment. We're walking into a cemetery. It's around sunset. The muzzen's playing. This is where the graves of the Shahids are held.

M m M. I see marker after marker. They're colorful with the kind of traditional gravestones on the top written in both in kind of Arabic characters. On the bottom, there are pictures yellow backgrounds, faces and color of different Shahids. Most of them are very young in their twenties, some of their teens, some older people, men and women, young women who look like they should be in high school, and middle aged women mothers. Probably. They're brightly colored pictures

surrounding it. Essentially looks like like a gravestone on top of a like marble box, and the sides of the box are covered in sort of colored picture inserts of the person. There's a picture I'm looking at right now of a martyr named barn There's three pictures of him on the front, one of him holding a puppy dog, one of him gesturing with an ak by his side, and other of him smiling. He was born in nine and died in two thousand fourteen. I'm looking at Shahid

Zana next. Oh, that's how About's brother, Zanna Abbas, was born in nine. He died in two thousand and fourteen fighting isis. Colbat puts a hand on the picture of his face frozen forever as a teenager. She kneels down and kisses her brother's grave. We walk in silence for a while, given Colbat space for her grief and doing our best to take in the feel of this place for ourselves. We reconvene as the sun falls down past

the horizon line. I don't know how you can understand it unless you how you can start to understand it without saying it's who they have to come to the first to understand what. Hoobat tells us that it's not uncommon for the parents of martyrs to spend hours at a time here reading or speaking to their deceased loved ones. I don't know, you cannot express this. You know, there is a man I showed, like elderly man, how he's

ready for unto his son. Some mammas they just say, like you know, speaking to them as you know, for hours. Sometimes you can and you say randomly mamas speaking for a little while. We just walked through the rows of graves together and mostly silent. Yet as we walk I noticed something written on one of the walls of the cemetery in Kurdish. I asked Hobart what it means? What is said? So are our symbolic leaders, and that's She explains that the Shahids hold a particularly sacred place in

people's hearts here. They are the only people in rojapan society who are considered to be beyond criticism. They sacrifice their own futures to provide one for their neighbors. In this way, they are seen as leaders, opening the door to a new world that the people they've left behind now find themselves challenged to step through. Thank you for taking us, for me to be honest, team, even if they don't ask me, because for me, the story it's

will not be completed without this book. Yeah dat chow chow chow chow chow a dinner at Radoslajano, or me via bell A Chow chow chow chow chow Dejano or me via Jimmy said. The Women's War is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you into your favorite shows.