Ep. 9: Kalashnikovs and Co-leadership: the road towards the Rojava Revolution

This week on Great in the Sack: When Misogyny Leads to Mayhem, we unpack a revolution born in the wreckage of war...where colonial borders, religious authoritarianism, and patriarchal power COLLIDE! And when these power COMBINE..sorry, almost did the beginning to Captain Planet. Anyway, somehow out of that collision, a feminist experiment began to breathe.

Welcome to Rojava, up in the northeastern part of Syria, where TONS of Kurdish women took up arms against ISIS...risking their lives to basically keep the rest of the country..even the rest of the world safe.

They were a group of soldiers formed out of the radical philosophy of Abdullah Öcalan, a former Marxist turned jailed Kurdish thinker. Rojava’s political model, democratic confederalism, is a rejection of both Western imperialism and religious authoritarianism. Power is decentralized. Ethnic divisions are challenged. And women are co-chairs, commanders, lawmakers, and rebels. Every council is led by one man and one woman. Every major decision is filtered through a lens of gender equality.

But this revolution is a direct response to decades of betrayal. Colonialists carved up Kurdistan, denying the Kurds a homeland and pushing them into the margins of nation-states that treated them as problems. Add to that the rise of armed Islamist groups enforcing Sharia law with an iron fist, and you get the perfect storm for what is to come in this episode.

We explore the tension between Islamic fundamentalism and female autonomy, how the Rojava model challenges both capitalist modernity and sectarian domination, and why this revolution, still very much under siege from every which way but loose, may be one of the most important feminist stories of the 21st century.

Red Crescent Rojava: https://hskurd.org/en/

Emergency aide for Rojava:

https://heyvasor.com/en/2024/12/03/emergency-aid-for-rojava/#pll_switcher

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show notes:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/11/26/group-denial/repression-kurdish-political-and-cultural-rights-syria?utm_

Conflict Between Turkey and Armed Kurdish Groups | Global Conflict Tracker

https://hawarnews.com/en/mother-of-martyr-hevrin-khalaf-my-daughters-killers-are-stillroaming-free

https://youtu.be/cMfJRnWu52Y

Wayback Machine

Timeline: The Kurds’ Long Struggle With Statelessness

https://nypost.com/2024/03/30/long-mistreated-by-iraq-the-kurds-need-americas-attention-now/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Turkey: Facing a New Millennium: Coping With Intertwined Conflicts, Amikam Nachmani, p. 210, 2003

Turkey Claims That Syria's Kurds Are Terrorists. Should Anyone Believe Them?

The Kurdistan Memory Programme

D'Alema: Abdullah Öcalan is right. Solving the Kurdish question is crucial for peace in the Middle East - The Kurdish Center for Studies