The attacks on Rojava have also targeted the symbols of women fighters, directing these assaults at the inspiration that the women-centered life built there has created for women across the world.
Women are at the forefront of the resistance in Rojava, writer Hatice Kavran, a member of the European Kurdish Women’s Initiative, said, describing the deliberate targeting of women’s representation as barbarism.
Hatice Kavran said the cutting of the braid of a fighter from the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) who was captured in conflict zones in northern Syria and displaying it as “spoils of war” created a deep rupture in the conscience of humanity. She condemned the presentation of this barbaric mindset under the name of belief.
Hatice Kavran said, “To do this under a claim of Islamic identity is, before anything else, to kill that belief. Through this, the women’s struggle is being targeted and a new life created by women is being destroyed.” She said women are targeted because they challenge the gender orders of existing traditional, religious, and ideological societies.
Hatice Kavran said those who hold this mindset see women’s movements as a threat to themselves. She said, “They oppose the women’s struggle with the aim of eliminating what they see as a threat. However, the arguments they use consist of primitive, oppressive discourse and practices devoid of reason and conscience.”
Hatice Kavran continued: “Unable to defeat women in the realm of ideas, they subject them to inhuman treatment and try to push them out of the struggle through fear. Yet women have only one claim: to create an alternative society. That is, to have equal rights with men as individuals in every sphere of life. However, when it comes to women, their humanity is set aside, and through their gender they are subjected to unacceptable treatment that attacks not only the individual woman but also society’s sense of dignity and morality.
The real reason women are being targeted is the stance they take, through their gender, against the existing patriarchal order represented by this mindset. A woman who does not oppose the existing order is seen as a ‘reasonable woman’ in these systems, and her being bought and sold or killed is not questioned. But the expression of women’s freedom in these patriarchal environments is intended to be perceived as something worse than rape, being bought and sold, or being killed. This is proof of how primitive and brutal this mindset is. By using certain misleading statements as justification, attempts are being made to portray women’s struggle for rights as if it were a crime or a wrongdoing. Women’s will be being denied.”
Not a war crime, but a crime against humanity
Hatice Kavran said that attacks carried out by the ISIS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as well as their affiliated mercenary groups, which make no distinction between civilians and combatants, constitute war crimes, while all forms of degrading treatment directed at civilians and captives fall under the category of crimes against humanity. She drew attention to the silence of international institutions, noting that this silence has paved the way for such attacks.
Kavran said, “The deafening silence of those in positions of responsibility today is the product of a conscience that pretends to be asleep. This silence is an open credit granted to the primitive and brutal mindset that prevails in Rojava.”
Where are those who rose up for Gaza?
Hatice Kavran also drew attention to what she described as “selective sensitivity” toward humanitarian crises in the Middle East, saying the silence of those who mobilized for Gaza in the face of the systematic targeting of women in Rojava amounts to “moral decay.”
Kavran also said: “When Gaza was reduced to rubble, reactions rightly rose and a wave of humanitarian aid emerged. But in Rojava, a stateless people are being subjected to what goes beyond disproportionate force, this is, in effect, an ‘assassination of dignity.’ No Israel soldier abducted Palestinian women and sold them in slave markets or cynically circulated such atrocities through the media. Turning a blind eye to this primitive brutality in Rojava means abandoning human dignity.”
In her final remarks, Hatice Kavran said that an alternative social model in which women exist with equal rights in every sphere of life represents the greatest threat to status quo–oriented and patriarchal structures.
She said: “Kurdish women have built a new civilization not only on the front lines, but within the very cells of social life. Men who embody the darkest and most brutal mindsets in the world were defeated by the bravest and most enlightened women in the world. This did not go down in history merely as a military victory; it also went down as the collapse, in the realm of ideas, of that primitive mindset that denies women’s will.”