WOMEN AT WAR
Here’s the Greatest Threat to Toxic Masculinity in the Middle East
But women who made history are at risk of being forgotten
During Women’s History Month, we should direct our thoughts far away to the Middle East — as well as focusing them at home. My rationale: I have reason to suspect the leaders of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have a common adversary that they don’t want to talk about, that they don’t want foreigners to remember, and that they don’t want their subjects to be aware of or admire — that is, women proficient in combat.
Their unspoken nemesis is the Middle Eastern female military force, the YPJ, who had the will and weapons to fight ISIL: the Islamic State barbarians who ravaged much of Syria and Iraq. Before the world would applaud the fighting spirit of Ukraine in response to Russian invasion, and be appalled by the cowardice of Afghan forces, we were amazed by the women warriors of the Kurds. Thus, I hail those female fighters whom the world and the media have now largely forgotten.
Imagine something of a combination of G.I. Jane, Harriet Tubman, and the Dahomey Amazons immortalized by the movie, The Woman King. The YPJ were the most surprising and consequential example — since this century’s beginning — of the potential of women in warfare. Those female fighters of the Syrian and Iraqi theaters of war battled courageously against the threat of rape, slavery, and extinction by ISIL war criminals (during the last half of the last decade).
They unquestionably were a major factor for why ISIL did not establish permanently a Taliban-like nation-state in portions of Syria and Iraq.
Constituting nearly a third of Kurdish fighters that had been mobilized in Syria, they once captured the fascination of many in the West, observers like me who were typically accustomed to seeing women marginalized in Middle Eastern cultures. With battlefield valor recorded by a curious Western media — much to the misogynistic chagrin of ISIL fighters — those warrior-saints of feminist empowerment were shattering preconceptions of female capabilities and vulnerability.
Arguably, one of their most significant combat accomplishments had been the propaganda value of shaming Arab men to take the battle to ISIL, while also terrifying jihadist war criminals with the notion of being slain by a woman — and what that would mean for their hopes of paradise in death.
It should not be forgotten that distinction earned in warfare has an interesting way of advancing the rights of oppressed peoples. Although it happened far too slowly, and to the lasting shame of the American republic, the prowess of America’s all-Black regiments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the African-American military accomplishments of World War II , would help awaken segments of a racist republic to the inherent dignity and rights of its dark-skinned populations.
And that would help usher in the eventual victories of a human rights movement.
Likewise, I believe the legacy of these female fighters will, in time, prove to be an existential threat to the patriarchal prerogatives of Middle Eastern potentates: particularly those in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. And I suspect that the heroism and exploits of these warriors, if repeatedly broadcasted via social media, could eventually shape the consciousness of women in the Middle East — exploits captured in media clips such as the one featured below. History can be a potent weapon of liberation.
Although some may be prepared to forget the valiant example of these warriors, I cannot.
But I can extrapolate what their example could mean for the struggle of Iranian women for liberty. The Kurdish fighters could well inspire Iranian women to take up arms — if necessary — against the ayatollahs’ patriarchal regime. The last thing the Iranian leadership would ever want is for its women to believe that they could become what the Kurdish fighters have become.
Would a peaceful overthrow of the Iranian despots be preferable? Absolutely yes. But to quote Malcolm X: “By any means necessary.”
To Iran’s west, the ayatollahs’ bitter enemy, the Saudi Arabian monarchy, would likely panic at the thought of their women seeing fellow Sunni sisters wielding an assault rifle — as well as a kitchen knife.
Imagine something of a combination of G.I. Jane, Harriet Tubman, and the Dahomey Amazons immortalized by the movie, The Woman King.
And Recep Erdogan, the president of Turkey, is also likely skittish. That autocrat has been determined for years to crush the Kurds. He has claimed that is because they pose a threat of succession for the Turkish part of the historic Kurdish homeland, Kurdistan.
But might it also be true that those YPJ fighters are the antithesis of the de facto caliphate he seeks to run? This is the same NATO-nation leader who said this of women in late 2014 — just months before the Kurdish female forces were proving their mettle on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria:
Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women: motherhood … You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature.
Such sentiments are not radically different from those of ISIL operatives, who think that females are nothing more than breeders and sex toys.
Years later in 2019, the Trump Administration would betray (with Putin’s approval) the Kurdish forces fighting for stability in northern Syria. Trump green-lighted Erdogan’s brutal assault on Syrian Kurdish forces — and the Kurd’s establishment of a female-empowering democracy.
Hence, in July 2022, a Turkish drone strike assassinated a female Kurdish commander and her colleagues. She had been credited with saving American lives on the battlefield during the USA’s fight against the ISIL terrorists.
The blood of Salwa Yusuk is on the tiny hands of Trump and Erdogan.
Thus, if Republicans in Congress are inclined to learn from history — and if they undertake any investigation of the Biden Administration’s admittedly chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan — let them first investigate Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds in Syria. That should include what happened to the female warrior-saints his dishonor left behind on the battlefield.
The YPJ’s women had the courage to fight when called to duty; Trump evaded military service for the Vietnam War to coddle his fake bone spurs.
So, men can have female heroes, too. Mine include the “boots on the ground” in the Middle East who wore a size 6 or size 7 in combat boots.
Thanks for your attention and past claps, and I welcome your responses. Share this article to keep the legend of the Kurdish female fighters alive. — Geronimo Redstone
