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In the middle of a war zone, despite constant attack and a Turkish and Iraqi-Kurdish economic blockade which has cut off access to sufficient food, medical supplies, and electricity, the four million people of Rojava are trying to build a new kind of feminist democratic politics.
According to the back of Meredith Tax's A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, a 'democratic society' with 'women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders' is growing in the midst of Syria's destruction. This new society - Rojava - was founded by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian-Kurdish offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). How does the PKK function internally, how will it deal with class divisions or regional differences?
The Turks don't want a Kurdish mini-state on their frontier any more than the Syrians want to lose territory to the Kurds (and neither do the Iranians, nor do the Russians want a Kurdish state on their border). And, Turkey is warming up to Russia and Iran in a bid to exit before a total rout of its proxies in Syria. Here Robert Fisk and Vijay Prashad present two nuanced perspectives.
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While the Syrian opposition is understandably bitter that the YPG and YPJ withdrew most of their energy from the war with Assad, leftists worldwide should be watching the remarkable efforts being made by Syrian Kurds and their allies to build a liberated area where they can develop their ideas about socialism, democracy, women, and ecology in practice.
In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers. However their principal objective in the mountains is not military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also anti-capitalist. Theirs is a commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism.
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