A year ago they were the heroines to be "exhibited" in media salons. For their determination to fight for freedom. Now silence has fallen over them and their struggle. They are no longer news.

of Umberto De Giovannangeli

A year ago they were the heroines to be "exhibited" in media salons or on the covers of glossy magazines. For their beauty, even more than for their determination to fight for freedom. Now silence has fallen over them and their struggle. They are no longer news. For many, not for Globalist. It has been a year since Hevrin Khalaf was killed along a highway in northeastern Syria, dragged by the hair, beaten and shot dead by mercenaries. Photos of her mutilated body later appeared on social media, in what many said was a clear message from the region's Turkish armed forces: this is the price that Kurdish women who fought for liberation will pay.

“Those were really difficult days“, Evin Swed told Haaretz, spokesperson for the Kongra Star, a confederation of women’s organizations in the Kurdish enclave – reflecting on the death of her friend. And things have only gotten worse since then, adds. “The public life of women in the region has become “unlivable“, riassume Dilar Dirik, Kurdish activist and researcher from the University of Oxford.

Kidnapped and enslaved

In chats and on social networks they bounce the terrible images of captured Kurdish fighters, dragged by the hair and raped by Turkish soldiers or Syrian militiamen before being shot in the back of the head.Kidnappings of women have become so common that the project “Missing Afrin Women Project” launched a website in early 2018 to track down reports of disappearances in the city of Afrin: from May 2018 have been registered 6.000 kidnappings, among which 1.000 women, a Kongra Star report claimed in August.

In the days following the decision by US President Donald Trump to withdraw troops from Syria northeastern last October, Turkish-backed forces poured into the Kurdish enclave with the declared goal of creating a “safe zone” of 30 kilometres (18 miles) along the border with Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decided to clear the area, which he describes as an outbreak of terrorism associated with the Kurdish Workers' Party (aka Pkk), that both Turkey and the US consider a terrorist group.

A recent UN Human Rights Council inquiry commission on Syria highlighted an increase in “sexual violence and gender against women and girls” in Syria in the first half of 2020. The report documented that at least 30 women in the Kurdish city of Tal Abyad were raped in February alone.

“A former judge confirmed that Syrian National Army fighters were accused of rape and sexual violence during raids on homes in the region. However, none of them had been convicted, but he was released after a few days”, observe the report.

From 2019, Kurdish women from all over the region have had to face “acts of intimidation” by Syrian soldiers, “generating a pervasive climate of fear that has effectively confined them to their homes”, added the UN report.

For the hundreds of thousands of Kurds who live in the approx 100 kilometers extending from Ras al-Ayn to Tal Abyad, the reality on the ground has become a daily nightmare. Local human rights activists report carpet bombings of hospitals every day, case, schools, public buildings, kidnappings, rapes, torture and murder. And the Islamic State is making use of this power vacuum to resettle itself is resurrecting in the region.

Swed argues that the Turkish forces “they mainly target women, as was evident in the brutal attack on the martyr Khalaf”. In the year following the murder, episodes of severe violence against women have turned into what Kurdish activists and leaders praise as a veritable campaign of sexual violence and targeted assassinations of prominent female figures.

In June, for instance, a Turkish drone attack killed three women – including noted women's rights activist Zehra Berkel – in the village of Helincê, just outside Kobane. “With its attacks on political and pioneering women, the Turkish state aims to destroy our hope and our will”, said Zehra Berkel's sister, Delia Berkel, in a subsequent video message. “We do not give the enemy the pleasure of saying that he killed a woman or a Kurdish politician and therefore destroyed the entire women's movement”, he added. That attack “it has been interpreted very symbolically, because in Kobane most people first heard of Kurdish fighters who took up arms against the Islamic State”, said Dirik – referring to the Women's Protection Units (Ypj) who fought alongside the Male People's Protection Units (Ypg) in the Syrian democratic forces that have allied themselves with the United States in the fight against Isis between the 2015-2019.

What is the Ypj

Alongside the Ypg is the Ypj, the Unit for the Protection of Women, led by Dalbr Jomma Issa. Together with her, in recent years we have met many other fighters on the front line to defend the freedom of their people. Many have lost their lives, as happened to Asia Ramazan Antar, killed a 22 years in August of 2016, but they have also accomplished exceptional feats, like that of the Syrian Democratic Forces officer (Sdf) Jihan Cheikh Ahmad, who first announced the battle for the reconquest of Raqqa in November of 2016.

Spoils of war

The leaders of the Kurdish enclave of Rojava, in northern Syria, confirmed to Globalist that Turkey is systematically targeting women activists and politicians who have been at the forefront of the country's political organization, using the justification it is “neutralizing the terrorists”. Many of the female victims were also mutilated with photos of their bodies displayed on social media. “It is one thing to kill someone in war, but what happens here is that they go to undress the dead woman's body and then they film it and circulate it”, afferma Dirik. “E’ to say: Look, here we are dishonoring the woman”, adds.

The culprits they are not Turkish soldiers, explains Professor Dror Zeevi of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva. I am rather “jihadists who have slowly turned into mercenaries” in the service of Turkey, she argues, given the importance of Kurdish women not only as politicians but also as fighters, “jihadists hate what they stand for – and that's a kind of revenge”, adds Zeevi, referring to the use of sexual violence.

“Part of the incentive is money and part of it is to turn a blind eye to the abuses that take place there“, rimarca Will Todman, Middle East program analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, un think tank con sede a Washington. The dispatch of Islamist militias with the charm of the spoils of war also absolves Turkey of direct responsibility, Zeevi points out.

The rise of female leadership in Rojava, as part of a “feminist revolution” locale, it has often been described in the international media as one of the few good news to emerge from the Syrian catastrophe. But now this extraordinary experience risks being erased with the most brute force, in the complicit silence of the international community.

Kurdish women fighters, said Dirik, they had tried to free not only Kurdish women, but all women living in northeastern Syria. They created a vital sense of sisterhood after the trauma of Isis, and now they are again terrified and brutalized by the Turkish-backed military operation, osserva.

In cities previously hailed as egalitarian spaces, where cooperation between Kurds had been successfully tested, Arabs, Syriacs, Armenia, yazidi, Turkmenistan, Christians and others, now Turkish flags are waving from many buildings and images of Erdogan adorn the walls. A Turkish curriculum was imposed in schools and, according to reports from local human rights activists, Turkish commanders are instituting Sharia law (Islamic law), by imposing forced conversions, the veil for women and administering gender segregation. Activists on the ground, displaced residents, the UN and other human rights groups say that “the language of the region is now Turkish and Arabic, and all Kurdish signs have been removed”, dice ad Haaretz, among the most authoritative scholars of the Kurdish reality. “Cemeteries, shrines and sacred places were destroyed by these groups”, adds, referring to the reports of groups including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Todman notes that the region now has “Turkish post offices, Turkish road signs, Turkish university campus, people now paid in Turkish lira and other incidents of growing ties between those areas and Turkey”. This makes Turkey present there longer, and it is certainly part of his integration plan”, dice. “Part of it is also having a chip to play in bargaining [on the] future of Syria”, adds.

In many ways, the penetration of Turkish influence is twofold, says Todman. In the first place, as part of a greater push for Turkey to assert influence in the region (and as seen elsewhere, in Kurdish Iraq, in Libya e, more recently, nel Nagorno-Karabakh); and secondly, in an attempt to stifle the power of the Kurds, which he has long seen as a security threat, rimarca Todman.

Determine the border area

Loqman Ehme, spokesperson for the autonomous administration of northern and eastern Syria, claims that “the Turkish occupation is similar to the ISIs”. According to Ehme, the Turkish armed forces destroyed hospitals, schools, water pumping stations and agricultural equipment, and seized the properties of local residents.

In August, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Syria, the flow of water from the Allouk water station in Hassakah province – the main source of water for about 460.000 people – would have been discontinued for 10 days. This is the eighth incident since the start of the Turkish military operation last year, which left tens of thousands of Ras al-Ayn residents without water in the summer heat and with a rising Covid-19 infection rate.

Turkey argued that the cuts were due to maintenance work. All these alleged tactics are employed “to remove the Kurds from the border”, says Nir Boms, researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. “It is not just a question of consolidating Turkish control but of 'Sunnifying’ the northern border, so there will be a buffer between Rojava and Turkey”. A combination of fighting and property extortion has already resulted, reportedly, to a demographic change, than a German Kurdish activist, Gulistan, defines “a weapon to resettle jihadist families”. Circa 200.000 Rojava residents were displaced last year due to the Turkish military operation, while others 300.000 were displaced in 2018 during the Turkish assault on Afrin, according to the Rojava Information Center.

Mercenary families have moved to where the Kurds resided, say Civiroglu, Boms e Todman. "The goal - underlines Civiroglu – is to totally erase the identity of the Kurds”.

.Todman predicts that, despite the ongoing military operation, the experience of “semi-autonomous government in northeastern Syria will have fueled Kurdish aspirations to continue to determine their own future and be able to govern themselves”. For the Kurdish activist Gulistan, this remains the only bright spot in a dark period:

“What they can neither kill nor deny is that the Kurdish people are willing to make any sacrifices to defend our identity, our history, our rights “.

A story that has the proud face of Kurdish women who continue to fight against cutthroats and serial rapists in the service of the Sultan of Ankara.

They don't give up. Even if their heroic resistance seems to have "gone out of fashion".

Scrive Ece Temelkuran, Kurdish journalist in exile, on the Espresso. It was October 2019, in the midst of the war unleashed by Erdogan in Northern Syria: "I imagine today a Kurdish female fighter in Rojava who is observing the disgusting banality of history going on in this mafia way. Erdogan's supporters will use his photo to spruce up their new hashtag, 'A good commander wins on the field. A good politician wins at the table. A true leader wins in both cases ’. Americans will use his image as political support material in the impeachment frenzy. For Putin and Assad, it will be the most valuable piece of trade. Erdogan has already served as a tool to consolidate his power in domestic political life in the most effective way for a decade now.. As the daughter of a people who have always lived through ups and downs over the centuries and have been pushed into the most uncomfortable geographical position in the world and who have always had to die hoping to be recognized, today this fighter must ask herself if her fight against Isis will ever be remembered ".

They are the partisans of the Third Millennium. Honor to them, the Kurdish fighters.

Globalist