Can Syria’s Kurds save their women’s revolution?

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This is not the future we were promised.

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Welcome to assignment on the documentary from the BBC World Service with Me Tim Hewall.

This is the story of a social experiment that's inspired people around the world

and that now faces a very uncertain future.

I've never walked into an atmosphere like there was in that hall that day.

Hundreds of women all united in this massive determination to hold on to the gains of what they

call the women's revolution. One after the other, women rose to their feet and

called the hall to these chants of Jinjian Azadi woman life freedom.

I felt the reverberations kind of rose through my body.

That's Natasha Walter, a British feminist writer. A year ago, she traveled to Northeastern Syria

to a place that says it's empowered women more successfully perhaps than anywhere else in the world.

Their determination, their daring, their confidence is something quite extraordinary.

Natasha, two rose to her feet. Believe me when I say that there are many, many women across the world

who are hearing your voice and who want to join you in saying woman life freedom.

Jinjian, Jinjian, Azadi. Jinjian, Azadi. Thank you.

The language is Kurdish. For 14 years amid the chaos of civil war,

Syria's Kurds and minority in an Arab-dominated state ran their own autonomous enclave,

Rajava, which means west or weather sunsets because it's further west than other Kurdish territories

and defended it against so-called Islamic State ISIS.

And they started to build what admirers around the world see as a model society,

where men and women are equal. But now the civil wars over, Syria's Kurds, men and women are

losing their freedom. This is a time of great, great crisis for the women in the area.

It would be heartbreaking if what they have fought for was lost.

Heartbreaking for them, heartbreaking for women across the world.

Rajava will now be controlled by the new government in Syria's capital Damascus,

whose leaders were once the very Islamists that Kurds regarded as their nemesis.

A video shot a few weeks ago showing an Arab fighter with a plat of hair he apparently caught

off a dead Kurdish woman's soldier, spread panic in Rajava.

He was proudly putting in his hand and said, I got it.

To be honest, we are afraid.

Poets, braids, the uncovered hair of independent, active women,

have become such a symbol of Kurdish freedom that the video prompted protests around the world.

Over the border in Iraqi Kurdistan, men and women carried a giant braid

meters long on their shoulders.

But protests won't save Rajava. What will remain of its autonomy and its women's revolution.

My name is Ruksem Hamid. I am the spokesperson of the women's protection units Yephej.

Ruksem speaking via a wobbly Wi-Fi connection from Kamishro in Kurdish,

a city on Syria's northern border with Turkey. The translator is Eve Morris Gray,

a young British woman so fascinated by Rajava that she spent three years working there

becoming fluent in Kurdish.

When I joined as the Kurdish people and also as a woman within Syria's system,

we did not have rights, language, culture, politics or law.

Yephej was a hope for every woman that women can defend themselves, their country and their people.

The Yephej, YPJ, or Women Military Units became famous around the world.

They fought in 2012 against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,

under whom even speaking Kurdish and public could land you in jail.

And they fought in 2014 against so-called Islamic State,

the antithesis of everything they believed in, but they didn't just fight.

Maybe to many people, they think of the Yephej as a military force,

but actually it's a revolution of mentality.

I was 22 years old when I joined.

Not them as best notable.

At that time, I really didn't know much how to think, but in the Yephej,

I learned how I could actually change things, how to build confidence.

For women, we never really had this self-belief.

It's been 14 years of revolution, but in these 14 years, every day, I've learned something new.

Also, it was my first time living all together as women, living free, thinking free,

talking and expressing ideas freely.

It all sounds too good to be true.

Assuming, of course, that you believe in fighting in the first place, which Natasha Walter doesn't.

I don't want to romanticize Rijava.

There have been reports even of forced recruitment of young women or girls into the army.

It's a highly militarized society, but I think that what it has achieved in terms of equal power

sharing and its desire to move towards direct democracy, restorative justice, I think is truly,

truly impressive. They have built a new science of women, as they call it.

Genealogy.

From the word gin, meaning woman.

So about how can you put feminism into practice?

And I was told that everybody who holds any kind of position in the autonomous administration

has to study genealogy.

The women fighters are only the most visible element of a much broader social and political experiment.

In Rijava, every public position must be held jointly by a man and a woman.

My name is Betty Varamar.

I'm a co-mirror of functional municipality.

We think that if there is a man and a woman together responsible for the decision,

they will take the best decision because the way of thinking is different.

Women think about children, about environment.

Also, when you put a law that should be a man and a woman,

we give more opportunities for women to be in this position.

If we let it for one person, especially in our society,

we believe that they will choose a man.

Also, in the council, 50% is women.

We think it affects how we can design spaces and buildings.

So everyone, give me an example of something that you've done in Kameshwar.

In our society, it's not safe for women to take a house by herself.

So we build two big buildings for women who want to live alone.

And we build a place for a gym, only for women.

Because here they can't go to a place where there's a man going to gym.

Tell me how much opposition have you faced from men?

Actually, when we started this system,

it was very difficult for a society to accept a woman as a mere.

Sometimes when they come to us, they say,

where is a man? I want to talk to him.

And after 11 years now, they say it's not matter if it's a man or a woman.

And sometimes they ask for a woman because she's very strong,

she listens to them, she can solve our problem.

Where did this radicalism come from?

Partly according to singer Ms. Gintahir,

from a long-held tradition of respecting women.

One of the Kurdish Proverbs, it's said,

Cher-chera Chijana Chimera, which means,

the lion, it's lion, regardless if it's a female or a male.

If we're going to talk about a fighter,

and the Kurdish history, there is, for example,

a fighter called Aysharash.

She was very famous, very heroic fighter that she was never

get out of her horseback.

She was always fighting alongside with the men to protect her tribe.

Dear mother, the song goes,

a day will come of a free country without war.

But free Rajava was built not just on tradition,

but on ideology.

The vision of a man who's now far away behind bars

in an island jail in Turkey.

Before Apple came to lead us,

we were in deep sleep, suffocated.

This Rajava fighter says,

Apple is an affectionate name for Abdul Urjalan,

the imprisoned founder of the Kurdish political movement

and armed group, the PKK,

that's designated as a terrorist organization

by Turkey and many Western countries.

Kurds who've never had a state of their own,

are split between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

It's only in Syria, which has the smallest number of Kurds

where Urjalan lived in the 1980s and 90s,

that his ideas have been put into effect.

The Rajava project

implements the system of democratic comfort journalism

that Urjalan came up with.

Multiple levels of councils

from village to district level to to the top level.

Zainet Kair of Sheffield University in the UK,

co-editor of a new book on Rajava's revolution.

It's like this laboratory

for implementing this ideological political program

for the first time.

And in practice, it looks very interesting

because they have this kind of centralizing

top-down disciplinary attitude

that kind of comes from their Marxist history.

But at the same time, they have this decentralizing approach as well.

So they have different entities

that their sole role is to criticize the decision-makers.

Decidents who oppose the entire project aren't so welcome.

There are reports that they have been put in prison

and there are reports that they have been expelled.

But I personally haven't heard

really bad treatment like people's disappearing,

getting tortured.

What does Ruksen Mahamad of the women's protection units say?

What are the things that you couldn't criticize?

Zatan, how do I so see you?

The most fundamental thing in our life

in the epigye is criticism and self-pricissism.

This is what develops us.

So in the epigye, I learned to be able to say

when I thought something was wrong,

with no fear in my heart.

And men accepted it.

And it kind of got one mark, and it kind of got one.

Some yes, some no.

But often those who would not accept

would see their mistakes through time.

But some people also don't.

What about the family of Berifan Omar,

the co-mare of Kamishwar?

Did you personally face any obstacles

in trying to do all the things that you wanted to do?

Actually, there's a lot of things happen.

Like now I am likely by myself.

I can't look with my family.

I'm not married.

So I live with my friend, a female friend,

when I was with my family.

They say you are late.

Why you are going there?

Why you going here?

Then I take this decision to live alone.

It was very difficult for them.

Now they're good with this idea,

because they see how I can do good things for my people.

But it takes a lot of time.

A lot of pains when he was from your mother and where she cried.

And now I'm not like a young anymore.

I'm 35 years old.

So when I visit my mother, the first thing she said,

when do you quit from this job and get married?

But now the council stopped all but the most essential work,

because no one knows what its future will be.

Night after night in Rajava's towns and cities,

Kurds have gathered around campfires in the streets,

drumming and dancing.

They've been guarding their city against possible attack

by forces of Syria's central government.

In early January, it launched an offensive against the Kurdish army,

the Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF,

after negotiations to reunite the country broke down.

The SDF was quickly driven out of Raka

and other mainly Arab areas that it took from ISIS

with American help eight years ago.

In mid-January this year, a ceasefire was declared

before government troops reached the Kurdish ethnic heartland further north.

But it's been shaky.

And the Kurdish city of Kobana remained besieged in the freezing cold of winter,

with little water or electricity

and filled with people who'd fled government attacks on surrounding villages.

So I came to one of the schools full with the displaced families.

This is local journalist Mustafa Ali.

The families have washed the clothes of their kids

and they just are drying it on the desks.

Even there are some families who brought their cattle with them

from the villages.

Each two families are sharing one classroom.

They don't have water, they don't have heat,

and they don't have any electricity.

The reason they came, as they told me,

because they're afraid from the jihadists

who have attacked their villages.

They told me that we don't want to have the same massacre.

That happened in the coastal area of Syria.

Kurds were terrified by the killing last year

of hundreds of civilians from another minority group,

Aloites, along Syria's Mediterranean coast.

The main perpetrators were militias supporting the new central government.

And in Kami Shul, this year, an Arab serving in the Kurdish security forces

suddenly turned his rifle on his comrades.

And filmed himself spraying them with bullets,

adding a celebratory ISIS-style soundtrack

to the video he then released.

Komere Berivan Umar says relations between Kurds and Arabs

are now a breaking point.

We were living together for many years,

but now people are afraid from their neighbor

because they see each by themselves how they kill our people.

Go to other side.

This is assignment on the documentary from the BBC World Service.

This is not the future we were promised.

Black held that up for a tagline for the show.

From the BBC, this is the interface,

the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work,

and your politics, your everyday life,

and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tim Hule.

For now, Kurds can't just think about how to preserve women's rights.

The threat now many feel is to the whole nation,

to the human rights of everyone in northeast Syria.

They can clearly see how traumatized she is.

She's changed smoking.

Reporter Sangah Haril is in a school in the Kurdish town of Al-Malikia or Derek,

talking to a middle-aged woman who's too scared to give her name.

She and her husband daughter and two sons fled their home near Raka,

an area now controlled by the Syrian army.

Now they've got nowhere to go, but they're barely thinking about the future.

Their minds froze on the day in mid-January,

when they set off in a convoy of cars and tractors and hit a roadblock.

She says they asked my son.

The older one aged 21.

What do you do?

Said, I have no job.

I'm not doing any work.

She said, then they opened the trunk, they sew a bag there.

There was a military trouser in the bag.

Then they started to beat him in the set.

We were panicking inside the car.

They took my son, they made him lie down with 14 others, 15 guys,

lie down by the side of the road.

My 11 years old daughter, she was like crying and screaming that they took my brother,

and they told her the sign of we're going to be here if we keep crying and shouting.

We're going to be here to you, putting the hand on the throat.

I'm going to cook now.

My brain jam, I'm hugging my daughter.

They've known there was danger ahead.

People driving the other way said to turn back, but that would have been dangerous too.

Then their car broke down, a tractor had to tow them,

but the rope kept snapping, so at the roadblock they were trapped.

And the woman's sister-in-law, also in the convoy, says the fighters manning it,

looked different to the ones they'd seen earlier in the journey.

Harlan, Julehoptunoki.

She's saying they all were going to literary clothes,

but each one is different, get different style or different brands.

They had like long beers and lug hairs.

And we, even so, the ISIS flag on some of their shoulders.

The Black Flag of ISIS.

But you think those people were part of the Syrian army?

They were mixed, even including the Syrian army.

Yeah, we don't know.

She's saying, for us, they all are ISIS,

you know, like they just have different names because they all have the same ideology.

And looks.

She, they, they, they moved them, they moved 15 guys, including my son.

This is his mother talking again.

To a trench that you can't see what will happen behind it.

And they start to shoot them.

There was 15 guys with armed like AK-47, 15 guys shooting them.

She couldn't see her son in the trench,

but her husband higher up on the tractor, could.

My husband is keep crying and he's keep shouting and saying,

like, I lost my son, my son is gone, my son is killed.

But suddenly, they had a chance to leave because somehow,

they'd retired to the tow rope.

I'm telling you, let's just save the family.

Let's go. I have this feeling that my son is alive.

If he is, we are about to get in the car,

and then this little girl from our family came.

She says, Hammodi is alive.

They're ahead of us.

He'd been released and delivered to his uncle and aunt,

who were further forward in the convoy beyond the checkpoint.

This is his aunt.

Jouar Awwanda.

Oh no, nothing.

Hammodi came shivering, hugged me very tight,

crying.

His whole face was full of blood,

he said, Miracle, I did not get killed.

There was one nice guy saved me.

He said, look, I can see his hands.

It's very small.

It's not a hand who carries weapons.

But they were telling me to bark like a dog.

Like, you girls are dogs.

And I was like, I'm not giving to bark like a dog.

That's why I got all these beatings in my face.

But I saw, like, they killed, they shot all of those guys,

who were lighted down behind me.

Hammodi was reunited with his parents, further down the road,

after they'd also eventually got through the checkpoint.

They showing me a video of the first moment that the meeting,

Hammodi, they hugging him,

and Hammodi looks like really tired and exhausted.

They all are crying.

You don't think there'll ever be any kind of justice

for the people who were killed.

Just to see something that you don't find it in Syria.

Whatever happens in this country,

there are always enemies of each other.

I'd put those allegations to the Syrian government,

but I've had no response.

It's only one of many stories of killings in North East Syria

in the past two months.

I've curred, killed by Arabs.

And in some cases, it's also alleged Arabs killed by Kurds.

What went wrong after years when Kurds said

that local Arabs had been part of their democratic system.

Faris Viran, from the main Arab district of Derrizor,

now teaches at Princeton University in the United States.

Yes, there were some local elections.

Arabs were in charge of certain city councils and stuff.

That's true.

But who are the top leaders who were controlling the military?

The Kurds.

Who are the people who control the big businesses,

and taking the money from the oil and the crops

that they sold outside of the region?

The Kurds.

And they forced too much of the Kurdish,

the PKK, leftist,

Ojalan propaganda on Arab citizens.

And when that happens, of course, people were revolting against you.

That's why Arabs, when the moment came

and they saw the SDF is going down,

that's why they rose up against them.

And somebody might say,

here, well, look at the SDF.

Like a few weeks ago, it was 70% Arab ethnically.

Like, this hojas.

And my answer to that is like,

those Arab soldiers joined the SDF

for the $300 salary.

That's it.

Not for ideological dreams or goals as some Kurds did.

I put that Arab perspective to Rajava's most powerful woman,

Fouza Yusif, a leader of the ruling party, the PYD.

Maybe you tried to impose a system

on Arab populations that they were not ready for.

It's a sociology of every place.

It's different from other locations to impose any system

or we can't say imposing the system to explain this system.

We needed a longer period.

Also, I think what happened in the Arab majority areas,

it's not only the people who choose to be against the administration.

It's basically a very well-established game,

a special war that's been prepared by some actors

posed on the people over there.

That's enigmatic.

Berivan Omar, the co-mer of Kamishwil, is more direct.

There's a lot of people who want to make this crisis

because they're Islamic.

They think one should stay at home,

women shouldn't work.

She's talking among others about the president of Syria,

Ahmed Al-Shara,

under his non-degare Abu Muhammad Al-Shalani,

he fought with Al-Qaeda and led other jihadi groups.

Now, he's trimmed his beard, wears sharp suits,

and has been embraced by President Donald Trump.

Al-Shara's government is still negotiating

with the Rajava's leaders about what exactly

integration into the Syrian state will mean.

Diplomats from America form with the Kurds' big backer

have tried to exact some concessions for them.

But Kurdish expert Zaynip Kaya says Rajava's unique system is over.

They've lost all their territory.

Their administration has been dismantled.

The idea of a man or a woman in charge of everything is gone.

In their internal practice, I think they will continue that.

But officially, there will be one person.

This is my prediction.

And usually that official legal person will be a man.

We'll see, but Al-Shara government is very patriarchal.

I don't think they would like to have a woman in power.

I think they would prefer a man.

There's only one woman in the current Syrian interim government.

As for the new Syrian army, the Kurds have been promised

for brigades of their own within it.

But does the leader fousy yourself think there will still be all women units?

There is no crystal clear decision in this regard.

They still don't give any positive signs.

That in a way is a red line for you, the continuation of those units.

Yes, it's a red line for us because the YPJ is the only guarantee to protect.

The Kurdish women as we're still in critical times.

We'll fight rather than disband some women can under say.

But if it came to that, the odds now would be against them.

What will survive, then, of Rajava's women's revolution?

Academic Zenit Pekaya.

That project has ended now.

But as an idea, it's not going to end.

The fact that they planted seeds gives a lot of hope

for people going forward that something like that might happen again in the future.

Shinga Mizgi in Tahir certainly is hopeful.

I do believe that after the freedom that the women in Rajava have practiced,

they would accept to go back to be slaves for men,

or they will be covered up and just be housewives.

I think the women will go to fight and will keep their freedom.

And Berivan Omar, who overcame family opposition to run a major city in her early 30s.

She certainly isn't planning to give up work and just get married.

Sometimes we think when women like found they read they can go back.

It's impossible to go back.

A assignment was presented and produced by me, Tim Hewell,

with sound mixing by Neil Churchill.

The production coordinator is Katie Morrison and the editor Penny Murphy.

This is not the future we were promised.

Like hell that out for a tagline for the show.

From the BBC, this is the interface.

The show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life.

And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.