The Women's War: A Utopia in Syria?

Collapse right now seems more plausible than it ever has before, perhaps even imminent, And depending on what movies and TV you watch, you might expect the retreat of your government to bring chaos and violence in its wake, But that is far from a foregone conclusion. In two thousand twelve, as the Syrian Civil War heated up, the soldiers and secret police of the dictatorial Assad regime pulled out of

northeastern Syria. The men and women who lived there took this opportunity to build something new over the ashes of the old. As the world order we've all grown up with phrase and crumbles, their story holds lessons for us all. The woman you're about to hear from is a Syrian militia woman named a Freen Masseo. I met her in July two thousand nineteen at a training camp in the Syrian desert. If you ask the Turkish government, a Freen and her comrades are all terrorists. If you ask many

of the people in northeast Syria, they are saviors. And if you listen to the mainstream media over in the United States, they're just the Koords. As I write this, a friend and her comrades are fighting and perhaps dying for their revolution, a women's revolution. Throughout history, the first city states were built on the basis of exploiting the woman. If we go back to history, we see that it was the women who created everything. In natural societies. Before

the rise of city states, women were leaders. But after the system of city states was built up by men, they began impressing women for the first time in history. Throughout the last four thousand years, a system has been built up over the woman. It doesn't allow her to work, to go outside, to take up the gun, even in her own home. She is not allowed to express her opinion. Even when you get married and should live a shared life, you cannot express your own opinion. You aren't free to

say what you want. Our goal is to bring an end to this mentality. We don't say that women should take a higher position than men. Our goal is a quality between women and men, to make it possible that our society can live with a free mentality. Neither women nor men should be the oppressor. There should be equality. The land in which a fren and her comrades live and struggle is called Rojava. The word means west in Kurmaji Kurdish, the language of most of its inhabitants. But

a Frien's comrades are not all Kurds. They are Arabs and Armenians and Yazidis, as well as Brits, Americans, Spaniards and Germans. The Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF are the umbrella organization they fight under, but a freen is a member of the Women's Protection Units or y p J and all female militia. You've probably seen videos and pictures of their fighters, beautiful young women bedecked in colorful kefia's

riting into battle against the Islamic state. Such images made for easy, feel good coverage in a region where those stories are hard to come by. But then the Caliphate lost its last territorial holdings, and over the months, the news spent less and less time talking about the Koords and Rojava until in winter two thousand nineteen this happened.

Now about breaking news in the fight against Isis the White House withdrawing troops from a key part of Syria as Turkey plans an attack on US backed forces there. Turkish forces have begun a major offensive in northeastern Syria with air strikes this evening. The streaks of artillery lit the sky of this border town, the Turkish army hitting

Kurdish targets just inside Syria. What we're seeing here, sir is arguably one of the greatest betrayals um in the history of of military In military history, the Turkish invasion of Rojava, ironically named Operation peace Spring, immediately displaced two hundred thousand people. Hundreds of thousands more would be made refugees by the end of two thousand nineteen, as majority Kurdish towns on the Turkish border were cleared out by

military force. The government of Turkey bust in Syrian Arab refugees in a bid determanently changed the demographics of the region. Western media coverage touched on some of this, but nothing piqued as much fear in American and European viewers as the threat that the chaos and Rojava might allow for a resurgence of ISIS. A senior US defense official just told CNN, Turkey's attacks are already heard in the U

S counter ISIS operations, effectively bringing it to a halt. Nick, what are you hearing there on the ground about what the attacks mean for the resurgence of ISIS. A Turkish shell slams into an ISIS prison compound. Moments later, IIS prisoners are seen making a break for it. Kurdish forces, already stretched too thin, warned US they'd struggle to contain ISIS detainees if Turkey attacked, and that's more or less the story. Everybody knows. Kurds fighting ISIS than Turkey, than

Turkey and ISIS. There was a lot of talk about Trump betraying the Kurds, but very little talk about what those Kurds were really fighting for. If you listen to the mainstream media IS telling of events, you might think their ambitions extended no further than beating ISIS. But the Kurds of Northeast Syria and their allies weren't just fighting Isis.

In fact, many of them considered the battle against the Islamic state to be just a side effect of the real fight, a war against the authoritarian virus at the heart of both ISIS and the dictatorial regime of Turkish President Erdwin. The people I met in Rajava believe the path to victory in this war the only way to achieve true peace is to strike at the heart of authoritari arianism, the domination of women by men. The next woman you're about to hear from is Horium Chamid. She's

a feminist, anti capitalist community organizer in Rojava. She lost a son in the fight against ISIS, but she does not consider Islamic militants to be her number one enemy. Women have been suffocated in society by the politics of the Syrian state. Their rights have been limited, and this mentality has suffocated them. So they are scared to resist, to resist against the oppression around them, to rise up and say this is my right. I exist. We have

difficulties with this. Isis were well known throughout the world. They were a barbarous enemy, not just for women, but for all people. But women also have hidden enemies around them. Oppressive men, customs, practices, economic repression, hidden things, women struggle in secret. What I found in Rojava in the summer of two thousand nineteen was so much stranger and so much more revolutionary than the battle against ISIS or the

insurgent campaign against Turkey. This is the story of the war in Syria you have not seen on the news, the story of an idealistic dream that had the unlikely chance to flower in the dry, flame racked planes of northeast Syria. I'm Robert Evans, and this is the women's war. I first heard about Rojava in two thousand fourteen through a series of half credible far left blog posts and

social media posts. The picture they painted was of an anarchist, feminist, utopian project in Syria, fundamentally reforming society at the same time as it led the fight against ISIS. It all sounded way too good to be true, and I was instantly suspicious. What I was reading about Rojava was so lacking in actual detail that it felt more like fan fiction than real reportage, and so I dipped in and

out of the story. It became gradually clear something significant was happening in Rajava, but it was hard to tell what, and I didn't think about it too much until March of two thousand sixteen, when I traveled to Iraq for the very first time. I was there to report on the ongoing battle against ISIS and the siege of Mosul, which was then in its early days. I spent several days near the city of Sulimania in Iraqi, Kurdistan, visiting

camps filled with Yazidi refugees. These men and women were members of a religious minority, neither Christian nor Islamic, that was targeted by ISIS for annihilation and enslavement. During the Caliphates days of expansion, its soldiers poured into the towns and villages around Mount Sinjar, the holy mountain of the Azides. Isis massacred men and boys, they enslaved women and girls. The Azidis have been targeted for genocide many many times

over the past few centuries. ISIS targeted them in part because their women were considered famously beautiful, and since they were neither Muslims nor people of the Book, Christians or Jewish folks, they could be taken as sex slaves under the sick interpretation of Islam practiced by the Caliphate. The story I had heard on the news was that President Obama in the United States Air Force intervened to stop this genocide. Isis's advance was halted by air strikes, allowing

the Azidies to flee up Mount Sinjar. Food had been dropped to sustain them. It was a good story, that rare tale of a timely U S intervention to halt a genocide. But once I started talking to survivors of the massacre, dozens and dozens of them, a different story emerged. The US air strikes had helped, and so had the food drops, but everyone I spoke to was emphatic that what had really saved them was not the U. S.

Air Force. It was the men and women of the YPG, the y p J, and the p k K. The story of Rojava is unfortunately a story with very many acronyms, and I will do my best to stop them from getting confusing. The y PG is a Kurdish acronym that translates to People's Protection Units. It is a mixed male female force, although the vast majority of its fighters are men. Most Kurds called the WIPEG, the YEPIGA the wy PJ are the women's protection units. These two malicious together composed

the bulk of the Syrian Democratic forces. They are the core of the Rojavan military. In two thousand fourteen, the Iraqi Kurdish military, the pesh Murga, abandoned the Azides and fled from the Islamic state. As one survivor told me, nobody helped the Azides but the Yepiga, and while they were still fighting a desperate battle against ISIS and Syria, the people of Rojava diverted troops to invade Iraq, punch a hole in Isis's lines, and rescue roughly thirty five

thousand Zidis from near certain annihilation. Hearing all this got me really interested. I started reading more. I learned that the Wipeg, the wy PJ, and the whole Rojavan experiment had only gotten started thanks to the help of a terrorist group called the p k K or the Kurdistan Workers Party. See what I mean about acronyms, the stories

filthy with them. We'll talk about the p KK a little more later, but in short, the U. S Government and the Turkish government consider them to be a terrorist group. Other nations around the world disagreed and consider them to be more of an insurgent army fighting for Kurdish independence from the Turkish government. Depending on where you stand, both descriptors are actually pretty fair. I wound up covering Iraq two more times over the next year in order to

cover the fighting against ISIS and Mosel. With every trip I made, I had heard more and more about the strange things happening in Rojava. The story percolated out, drip by drip. Most of the detailed coverage of the Rojavan political system was still confined to left wing sources, but the details had solidified a bit, and I started to run into scholarly publications too. In two thousand sixteen, I came across the book Revolution in Rojava, a very dense

analysis of what was happening in the area. Now, finally I had a hard data to go with the lurid, praiseful stories i'd come across on the internet. What I read only made what was happening in Rojava sound more incredible and enticing. I learned about the women's houses buildings established by the new government, and towns and villages they controlled. These were places where women could go for help, escaping

from abusive relationships, accessing education, or getting job training. In some communities, the divorce rate leapt to more than fifty percent. Almost overnight. I grew more and more convinced that something very interesting was happening in northeast Syria, and over the next two years I committed myself to visiting. Getting to Rojava was easier said than done. Though there are no

commercially available airports in that part of Syria. The people of the region were still considered rebels by the Assad regime, so I couldn't just fly into Damascus either. The only safe way into Rojava was across the Tigris through the Iraqi border. It was not an easy or an inexpensive journey to take. It took time to get my career and find anansws into a position where visiting was even

a possibility. And while I waited and watched from a distance, the situation on the ground in Rojava continued to evolve. In October of two thousand seventeen, Rocca was liberated by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Rocket is a large city in Syria that became the capital of the Islamic State for

several years. The YPG and YPJ did the bulk of the fighting to retake it from ISIS, supported by U S artillery and air power, but once the Caliphate's territorial holdings collapsed, the United States reduced its support of the SDF, the majority Kurdish militias it had previously backed. The Turkish government considered the YPG and the YPG, which made up the bulk of the Syrian Democratic Forces, to be nothing more than Kurdish terrorist groups, and they wanted to wipe

them out. In January of two thousand eighteen, the Turkish government launched Operation Olive Branch, and their soldiers invaded the Kurdish majority city of Afrin in Rojava. At this point, the United States still provided air cover and military aid to the sd F, but they withdrew their protection from

the area around Afron. The Turkish government began an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds there, bulldozing cemeteries, confiscating homes and businesses, and moving in Arabs to change the demographics. Many saw the invasion of Afron as a grim prelude to what would happen to all of Rojava when the Trump administration finally withdrew its support and American soldiers. I began to feel that perhaps there was a ticking clock on my chances to see this thing with my own eyes.

By that point, the cause of the Rojavan Revolution had been taken up by left wing movements around the world. When I visited Athens in early two thousand eighteen, I saw protect Afron stickers up on light poles throughout the city. One of my friends in Dallas held fundraisers for the Kurdish Red Crescent of Humanitarian Aid organization in the region. On left wing media, the story of Rojava attained mythic proportions.

One representative example is this episode of the now defunct podcast The Guillotine, at the time, a popular far left news and politics show. I don't know you keep waiting around for a revolution. These motherfucker's are walking around with anarchists, symbols painted on walls, hammers and sickers, sickles painted walls, a K forty seven. They're literally fighting against states, trying to destroy them. They're trying to create gender equality, They're

putting property in common. They've eliminated fucking prisons and cops. I mean, what what more? What what if this movement is too complicated for you and and not pure enough for you? To get involved in. You're gonna be waiting all goddamn day. Now, I knew a lot of that had to be wrong. For one thing, Roshava definitely had prisons, and there were numerous stories about the ones where they

kept captured ISIS fighters. But at least some of the idealistic, anarchist wet dream stuff was in fact written into the Rojavan Constitution. Here's how it starts. In pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy, and led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability, the charter proclaims a new social contract based upon mutual and peaceful coexistence and understanding between all strands of society. It protects fundamental human rights and liberties, and

reaffirms the people's right to self determination. This constitution declared all cantons, which are essentially states, and the autonomous regions to be founded upon the principle of local self government. Article twenty three of the constitution is particularly compelling to me. It declares everyone has the right to express their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and gender rights, and everyone has the right to

live in a healthy environment based on ecology balance. Under Article twenty six, all residents of the autonomous regions have the inherent right to life. Execution is banned in Rojava. Article twenty seven guarantees women the inviolable right to participate in political, economic, and social life. Some parts of the constitution do run counter to the far left fantasies about Rojava.

The Charter Esta wishes a police force the sayish and explicitly guarantees the right to private property, but it also guarantees the rights of children, prohibits monopolies in shrines labor rights, and guarantees a minimum representation of for either sex in the judiciary. In short, the Rojavan Constitution represents what would be a shockingly progressive platform in the United States, let

alone a chunk of rural northeast Syria. And this constitution was not just a pie in the sky dream cooked up by some left wing radical smoking weed in a basement. At its height, three to four million people lived under this system, and more than two million people still do today. And right now you're probably wondering, how in the hell did any of this happen in the first place. That, my friends, is a weird and winding story, Like everything

in the Middle East. The origins of what's happening in Rojava stretch back many centuries, but for the sake of brevity, we will start with the tale of a Felon named Abdullah a Jelan now Aujelon is one of those folks who gets labeled as both a terrorist and a freedom fighter depending on who you ask, and to make matters more confusing, both of those terms are pretty accurate descriptions of the guy. He was born in nineteen forty eight.

Probably that's essentially a guest because Aujelon was born in a tiny village in eastern Turkey Oor merely and it was no one's priority to keep track of birth certificates back then. He was born part Turkish and part Kurdish in the eyes of the Turkish government, though that Kurdish part of him didn't exist from its beginning. The government of Turkey has had a weird obsession with denying the

existence of non Turkish people's native to Anatolia. When Aujolan was born, it was a crime to even speak the Kurdish language. He got a job working in civil service and eventually started teaching political science at the University of Ankara. As the years went by, Aujolon found himself more and more frustrated by the outright denial of Kurdish identity in Turkey. To give you an idea of exactly how bad it is, in nineteen ninety one, Layla Zanna became the first Kurdish

woman to win a seat in the Turkish Parliament. After she took her oath, she spoke this single sentence in Kurdish, I take this oath for the brotherhood between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people. Now, at that point nineteen nine one, Kurdish was still illegal to speak in public. It had only been legalized to speak in private earlier that year. In videos of her speech, you can hear

the immediate, almost violent response to her words. Layla was not jailed immediately for her actions because she had parliamentary immunity, but her brief Kurdish speech set at emotion a sequence of events that in nineteen ninety four led to her arrest and imprisonment for ten years. This all happened in

the nineties, when Turkey was working towards EU membership. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, when a Jolan was a young man, even speaking Kurdish and private was illegal, and as he grew more politically aware, Abdullah began nursing a deep rage over how his people were being treated. In nineteen seventy four, he met up with between seven and eleven other young men who were furious at the status quo. They put together plans to build a Kurdish leftist organization,

one unlike any political party that existed in Turkey. Augelan was elected the leader of this political youth group, which was initially just called the Epocular or the Followers of Appo. Appo is Aujolan's nickname. It means uncle, and it's a word I was to hear hundreds of times throughout my days in Rajava. Over the next several years, the Apocular evolved into the p k K, which was officially established

in nineteen seventy eight. It was initially a Marxist Leninist movement whose aim was the overthrow of the Turkish government. In its early days, the p KK feuded with other left wing political parties, at times fighting their members in the streets and carrying out assassinations. Gradually, the movement morphed into a ragged guerrilla army, executing acts of sabotage and inciting riots against the Turkish state. In the early nineteen eighties, the p k K launched a mass of violence campaign

aimed at destabilizing the government. By nineteen eighty four, this had erupted into a full fledged insurgency, and the p k K were as vicious and brutal as any other insurgent movement in history. They frequently killed civilians who did not support them. The vast majority of their targets were Turkish soldiers or police, but they did not hesitate to murder innocent people who stood even non violently against them. Throughout this period, Abdulla Agellon and his fellow leaders fled

to the safety of Syria and dug in There. The Assad regime was hostile to Turkey and more than happy to sponsor rebels on their soil. For nearly twenty years, Augellan and his comrades ran one of the most brutal insurgent campaigns in history. Well relatively safe themselves under Hafez

al Assad's protection. Tens of thousands of people were killed, mostly by the Turkish government, but Apple was not squeamish about sending huge numbers of people to their deaths, and as in nearly all wars, most of the dead were civilians, normal people caught in the crossfire. Up to this point, the story of the pe KK and of dela Agelon sounds like the story of many other insurgent groups and their leaders. But there was something that separated of de

la Agelan from his blood soaked peers. He was capable of admitting his failures. In the early nineteen nineties, the b KK realized that their campaigns of indiscriminate violence had cost them the support of many civilians in the rural Turkish villages where they operated. Aujelon ordered an end to the targeting of civilians. Abdullah's ideas about women were also evolving in this period. The first p KK women's organization

had been formed in nineteen eighty six. Seven years later, in nineteen ninety four, Augelon created the first all female military unit. Now this was not entirely a new idea. Iranian Kurdish rebel groups had experimented with female ele military units back in the early nineteen eighties. But Aujelan did more than just crib ideas from his fellow revolutionaries. He committed himself to fighting for improvements in women's rights. Along

with his bloody guerrilla struggle. Aujelon, the unquestioned leader of a violent authoritarian insurgent army, started asking his men to cook for their wives. He wanted women's time freed up for armed training and ideological study. Aujelon's political view shifted considerably throughout the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. While once to committed Marxist Leninist dedicated to the global struggle of the proletariat, Augelon softened into more of a moderate socialist.

In nineteen ninety six, he named Germany as an example of a socialist state he supported. In nineteen ninety nine, Abdulla Agelan was captured on the Lamb in Kenya thanks to a multinational intelligence operation. He was jailed on an island prison named Mrali and the Sea of Marmara, and he remains there to this day, alone in his small cell, guarded by a thousand men. He began to delve in a Sumerian mythology and history textbooks focused on Neolithic humanity.

He grew convinced that the root of all authoritarianism the essential moment in which human civilization had gone wrong? Was the domination of women by men. Prisons seemed to have wrought a permanent change over Augelon. Whether this was a coldly calculated plea for mercy from a brutal terrorist warlord or the very real evolution of a man reconsidering his past. Abdullah's new ideas had a profound impact on the p k K, for he was still their leader. Augelon wrote

book after book about his new theories. He smuggled them out of prison by hiding them as legal briefs sent to the lawyers who were permanently appealing his court case. As the years went by, Augalon's politics evolved further. He came across the work of Moray Bokchin, a Jewish American writer and anarchist philosopher who, like Augelon, had once been a Marxist Bookshin had been one of the very first people, back in nineteen sixty five to be warning humanity about

climate change. He believed this looming crisis required a fundamental shift in reordering of society away from capitalism and towards a less destructive, more egalitarian society. Libertarian municipalism is the system he eventually proposed for this reordering. In brief, libertarian municipalism calls for a radical participatory democracy, with every person having an equal say over the matters that affect them directly.

Local communities in this system should govern themselves directly through citizens assemblies and elect recallable representatives who coordinate and communicate with other communities. The goal is to prevent situations like we have in the modern United States, where voters in a city make laws to govern the lives of people in vastly different rural communities, and vice versa. Book Chain believe this system would also make it easier to form

an ecologically responsible society. No community would vote to have, say, an incredibly toxic oil refinery in their own backyard. Book Chin wrote in nineteen ninety one that libertarian municipalism is not merely a political strategy. It is an effort to work from latent or incipient democratic possibilities towards a radically new configuration of society itself, a communitarian society oriented towards meeting basic human needs, responding to ecological imperatives, and developing

a new ethics based on sharing and cooperation. That it involves a consistently independent form of politics is a truism. More important, it involves a redefinition of politics, a return to the words original Greek meaning as the management of the community or police by reasons of direct, face to face assemblies of the people in the formulation of public policy, and based on an ethics of complimentarily and solidarity locked up in m orally, book Chin's ideas merged with Aujolon's

own theories about history and feminism. He named his ideal system democrat at a Confederalism and published an essay laying out how it should work in two thousand eleven. This became one of the foundational documents of the political system in Rojava, and so through this very unlikely chain of custody, the ideas of a fringe American anarchist thinker became the foundation of a system that more than three million people live in today over in Syria. It is easily one

of the unlikeliest things that's ever happened. From my perspective as a journalist, judging how real everything in Rojava was was complicated by the impressive level of pr savvy that can be found among the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. It started back in nineteen eighty eight when Saddam Hussein began gassing Iraqi Kurds and world attention was drawn to their plight by Iranian and British journalists who filled the

massacres from the air. Ever since, Kurdish movements have had an intense appreciation and a deep gut understanding of how the power of the global press can be harnessed to help their movements for liberation, and so as the SDF advanced against ISIS, they did so with the aid of a BRU and social media campaign which spread footage of the beautiful young women of the YPG squaring off against fundamentalist militias. Regular Twitter videos of liberated towns showed women

discarding their veils in Ni Cobbs. This sort of content was true, these things were actually happening, but it was also a targeted propaganda campaign aimed at warming the hearts of liberals and conservatives alike back in the West. The Good Wild campaign succeeded in drumming up support for Rojava around the planet. It also drew in hundreds of international volunteers, mostly young men and women from around Europe and North America, who traveled to Rojava to fight and to help build

a new egalitarian society. The stories of these international volunteers created something of a sensation, particularly within the global left wing media ecosystem. The revolutionaries of Rojava position themselves as the tip of the spear in the global battle against

creeping fascism. In late two thousand seventeen, after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Anarchist International SDF volunteers posted pictures of them selves with an anti fascist action flag the Antipha flag you might have seen it rallies, and the words from Mojava to Charlottesville, Solidarity with all

anti fascists Avenge heather Higher. Some of this messaging was carefully coordinated by different organizations in Rojava, like the Syrian Democratic Forces, but a lot of it, including the Avenge Heather Higher photo, was ad hoc and grassroots, a product of the fact that this revolution genuinely drew in large

numbers of committed leftists from around the world. These people saw themselves as inheritors of a great anti fascist tradition, the spiritual successors of the leftist partisans who first fought fascism during the Spanish Civil War and the members of the French, German and Italian resistance movements. During World War Two, Kurdish fighters in Syria began to adopt foreign anti fascist

anthems as the soundtrack to their revolution. This ranged from revamped versions of old Irish militant folk music to covers of rage against the Machine songs to the old Italian anti fascist anthem, the Chow Chow. Bela Chow means goodbye beautiful, and in its original incarnation, it was a protest song by female laborers and the patty fields of northern Italy.

After Mussolini came to power, a new version of the song was adopted by anti fascist freedom fighters, and Bela Chow grew into an international anthem of freedom and resistance in Kurdish culture. The adoption of Bela Chow goes back to at least two thousand and nine, when Iranian Kurdish filmmaker as San Fatahian made a YouTube video which he dedicated to the Kurdish people and all people struggling for freedom.

Fatahan felt a powerful emotional connection to the anti fascist version of the song, which centers on a partisan waking up in the morning to find a fascist soldier at his door. The partisan and the song accepts his duty, which is to die a beautiful death struggling for freedom, and he expresses his hope that he will be buried in the mountains and a flower will bloom over his grave.

Fatajan's own death came later in two thousand nine, when the Iranian government executed him for being a member of a Kurdish militant group. In two fourteen, the Kurdish singer Chia Madani released the cover of Bella Chow that you just heard, set over video of the men and women of the YPG and J marching into battle against Isis.

The positioning of Rojava as part of this global struggle against fascism was simultaneously canny, an intelligent way to get international support, and also a large risk to their political support from some of the governments of the world. Anti fascism is, shall we say, a touchy political stance in this part of the twenty first century. In two thousand nineteen, the histories of Italian and Kurdish anti fascism and the history of the song Belli Chow merged rather tragically in

the death of Lorenzo Orsetti. Lorenzo was an Italian citizen, a cook, waiter and somalier from Florence who grew inspired by the Rojavan Revolution and joined the STF as a foreign volunteer. He died fighting Isis in March of two thousand and nineteen, and during his funeral service, men and women sang Beli chow in both Italian and Kurdish Lacha lachachachacha Roa. In the spring of two thousand nineteen, the stars finally aligned to allow me to visit. My podcast

Behind the Bastards took off that year. Right around the same time, I wrote several articles in the wake of the christ Church massacre that went very viral. I launched a fundraiser and asked my fans to support my desire to do more conflict journalism. To my utter shock, they raised more than forty thou dollars. I now had the opportunity in the funding. All I needed was a way to get into Rojava and get the access I needed to learn the truth about its system. I reached out

to a colleague of mine, Jake Hanrahan. Jake is a four A reporter from Vice and currently an independent journalist. He has a podcast called Popular front that focuses on the gigy details of modern conflict. Back in two thousand fifteen, Jacob found himself as the only Western journalist in southern Turkey during an uprising by a Kurdish youth militia, the y d g H or yet aga Hash. It started when he received a message from a Turkish contact of his telling him that the y d g H had

taken over a small city in southern Turkey named Jizra. Well, I was there in January when that happened. By the summer all it was total. So like they you know, all the different towns basically set up why d H franchises.

And it went from being like the youth going like yeah, we've got some rifles, which you know everybody does down there, so the p k K coming the adults coming down from the mountains where they're kind of hide out and training them up and being like this is how you build a bomb, this is how you do this, this is how you do this. So I was like fuck, it went there straight there, and you know, with two

of my colleagues and yeah, man, it was crazy. We just saw like PKK gerrillas in like civilian clothes being like we're the hy dg H. And it was like, what you're thirty five, Like you know what I mean, Like you're not the White d H. But then we were seeing like, you know, eighteen year olds becoming like pure militants, you know. So yeah, that's kind of my history with a film of them. As you know, that went bad, we got arrested and sent to jail for

a little bit. Jake and his crew spent several harrowing days in a Turkish prison, incarcerated with a mix of refugees and ISIS fighters. He was obviously freed and returned to England. The whole experience sparked in him a fascination with Rojava. He started studying the movement and making connections to the people in the area. Since he'd been arrested covering a Kurdish uprising, he had sort of an in that most Western journalists lacked. It was a little like

having done time for the mob. Even though as a journalist covering the White d g H, Jake had not been entirely sympathetic to the movement. In fact, we were actually questioning him. I was like, why are you shooting like police officers, like they're not, you know, they're just policing the air that used their job, you know, So to be honest, like some of it was quite critical. Between Jake's connections in Syria and my friends in Iraq, we were able to put together a rough plan for

getting into Rojava. It was sort of unclear up until the last moment whether we'd be able to cross the border legally with the permission of the Iraqi government, or if we'd have to pay a smuggler to sneak us in. Either way, both Jake and I were committed to trying, so in July I plopped down three thousand dollars on airfare. I had to be careful to make sure I didn't accidentally book Jacob leover and is Standbul. He is quite

literally a wanted man in Turkey. Jake's main job was to find us a fixer, and fixers are a mix between a journalist and interpreter, a tour guide and a security adviser, or at least the good ones are. They helped foreign journalists find stories, gain access, and conduct interviews in war zones. The quality of your fixer largely determines the quality of your story. When I was working in Mosle, I'd had the extreme fortune of working with two of the very best fixers in Iraq, Sangar Eel and I

are was Sul. Most of the journalists working in Syria, we're all going after the same stories, interviews with captured ISIS fighters and ISIS brides. World media only really wanted stories from Syria that involved ISIS. I wanted to capture something different, an exploration of the Rojavan revolution, of this women's war and how it had transformed society. To get that story, we were going to need the very best

fixer we could find. A couple of weeks before our flight, Jake reached out to me with the name Kabat a Bass. His sources said she was good, very good, but neither of us had met her. Picking Kabat was a roll of the dice, as these things always are. Thankfully, it would turn out to be one of the luckiest rolls of my life. For the trip from Iraq to Rojava,

we leaned on my old friends Sangar. I had spent days watching him smooth talk Iraqi generals into letting us in bed with troops at the bleeding edge of the fighting, and Mosle Jake, and I figured he could probably talk his way through any issues we had at the border. With all that settled, the only thing left to do was to actually fly to the Middle East. I'm on my way first to Dubai, where I have a fifteen hour layover, so about fifteen hours in the air and

about a fifteen hour layover. The nice thing about that is that the hotels in Dubai are really luxurious and very cheap. The journey to Iraq from the West coast of the United States is not a simple one. It started with a four hour flight from my home to Los Angeles, and then a one hour layover, and then a thirteen hour flight to Dubai, and then a fifteen

hour layover and then a short hop to Suleimania. I had a lot of time for reading during all that, and during the final flight of my journey I finished reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. It's a book about that famous author's time as a volunteer soldier fighting against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell had rather

complex political views. Most people would probably sum them up as broadly socialist, but more than anything, he was anti authoritarian, so in the late nineteen thirties he traveled to Spain to fight alongside anarchists and communists, battling desperately to stim the onslaught of the deadliest ideology mankind has ever produced. In the book, he described his attitude in going over this way, I had promised myself to kill one fascist. After all, if each of us killed one, they would

soon be extinct. Sadly, for Orwell and the world, the struggle of the Spanish anti fascists ended in defeat, and it was a defeat that began within their own ranks. The anarchists who had started the struggle against Francisco Franco were outmaneuvered by social democrats and communists. Many of them were purged violently by the people who should have been their comrades or well. Watched in horror as his friends and battle buddies were arrested and executed. He barely escaped

Spain with his own life intact. Musing over the tragedy. Months later, he wrote, the fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because things such as individual liberty and a

truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency. The situation Rojava has more than a few parallels with the Spanish Civil War, and as my plane descended into Sulimania Airport in Iraqi, Kurdistan, I couldn't help but wonder if I too was stumbling into the last days of an equally beautiful, doomed effort. Jan game Moy The Women's War

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