WHEN Anna Campbell heard that Kurdish women were fighting the jihadists of Islamic State in Syria, she left her job as a plumber in Britain and joined them. Ms Campbell (pictured), who was privately educated, said she wanted to defend the “revolution of women” in Kurdish-held parts of the country—even though the British government regards such volunteers as, in effect, terrorists. On March 15th a missile killed her as she fought with the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), the Kurds’ all-female militia, against the Turkish army.
Kurdish women first took up arms in the early 1990s, as members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long war for self-rule in Turkey. Inspired by Murray Bookchin, an obscure American philosopher, Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s leader, sought to empower his female comrades. “The 5,000-year-old history of civilisation is essentially the history of the enslavement of women,” wrote the...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa https://ift.tt/2IIA7jR
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