Photographs of Kurdish women guerrillas fighting against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Western Kurdistan (Rojava) with their weapons have gone viral recently. Only after seeing those photos, an interest on Kurdish women showed up. All of a sudden, Kurdish women have gone from mothers in black crying for their sons who died in guerrilla warfare to become guerrillas themselves. The only difference is that this time young Kurdish women are on the front line instead of the elder ones. This piece focuses on the other essential roles of Kurdish women within the Kurdish Freedom Movement. They are not only mothers or guerrillas, even worse most of the time they did not choose these two roles, they had to assume them within cruel war conditions or due to the patriarchal structure of the Kurdish society. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the majority of Kurdish women, that remain between black and white, as politicized actors both in the parliament and in their neighbourhoods. Kurdish women not only fight against state’s violence and patriarchal structure of Kurdish society but they also have been coping with the assimilation politics of Turkish feminists who impose these politics grounded their privileged class position and class concerns (Alp, 2015). This paper mainly examines the different roles assumed by the women in three abovementioned fronts without falling into the error of reducing them into showcase models.  

Reference: Alp, R. (2015) 'Kürt Özgürlük Hareketi'nde Kadın Direnişi', Toplum ve Kuram 10(Kürdistan'da Doksanlar: Şiddet, Direniş ve Hakikat): 75-98.