GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON TELLS
the extraordinary story of the Kurdish heroines who fought on the front lines alongside U.S. forces and helped defeat Islamic State in Syria. From the February 23, 2021, online Middle East Member-Led Forum program “Daughters of Kobani: Kurdish Women Warriors Against Islamic State.” GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON, Journalist; Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Author, The Daughters of Kobani, Ashley’s War and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana EDDY SIMONIAN, Vice Chair, Middle East MemberLed Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California— Moderator
T
his is . . . the story of the women who handed the Islamic State its first defeat as part of a fighting force that stood up in the showdown of the town called Kobani on the border between Syria and Turkey. Really and truly the thing that struck me the most when setting out to write this story was that it started with a question I couldn’t answer, which for me is a hallmark of a great story. How in the world did one of the most far-reaching experiments in women’s equality come to be on the ashes of the fight against the Islamic State, created by women who truly fought ISIS room by room, house by house, street by street, town by town as America’s ground force for a half decade? It’s a military story about the special operations community in the United States and its quest to work with local partners on the ground who were willing to take the fight to ISIS at a time when ISIS had had not one defeat. It’s a story of women, which is deeply relevant to our times, as it’s about women who rewrote the rules governing their lives and who really reshaped the way an entire generation thought about what women’s work is. It’s a politics story about America and its hunt for a policy when it came to the tragedy known as the Syrian Civil War. As ISIS surfaces, how are the Americans going to counter the rising forms of the Islamic State at a time when U.S. forces absolutely could not politically be deployed on the ground? Then it is also a story of media, because the truth is that the reason why we know about the fight for Kobani, and the valiant stand of this David-versus-Goliath force that truly had women’s rights and women’s equality right at the heart of it—this story also happened because it happened right on the border with Turkey,
DAUGHTERS OF KOB
