AbbyHiggs

Abby Higgs is an essayist and blogger. Her work has appeared in Cobalt Review, The Barely South Review, Freerange Nonfiction, Everyday Genius, Bustle, Hellogiggles, What Weekly, and The Huffington Post. She lives in Baltimore with her collection of Annie Lennox paraphernalia.

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By AbbyHiggs • 9 years ago

The Women’s Protection Unit Fighting ISIL

On November 1, 2014, protesters worldwide took part in World-Kobanê-Day demonstrations, condemning ISIL’s attacks on the Turkish-Syrian border town of Kobane. They did so to declare solidarity with active resistance factions in the region, the most famous of which was, and still is, the YPJ.

Who are the YPJ?

Founded and organized in 2012, the YPJ, also known as the Women’s Protection Unit, is an all-female militia operative in the Rojava region. This region, with a population of 4.6 million, is a de facto autonomous state not recognized by the Syrian government.

The citizens of Rojava refused to be “Arabized” by the Ba’ath Regime, which had long sought to suppress the identity of the 4 million Kurds in Syria. In 2011, when Tunisian and Egyptian opposition groups formed and mounted insurgencies in what was known as the “Arab Spring,” so did defiant Syrians. This instigated a civil war. In 2012, the regime’s authority crumpled in the Rojava region, leaving “Rojavans” (a mostly Kurdish population, though there are Turks, Arabs, Chechens, and Assyrians) with a dismal choice to make: They could either align themselves with their persecutors, the Ba’ath Regime, or they could join the Islamic militant groups.

They chose neither.

What does the YPJ do?

Emerging from the Kurdish Resistance Movement, the YPJ serves to protect Rojava not just from the Islamic State, but from al-Qaeda and Bashir al-Assad’s Syrian government. Currently, the group fights alongside their male counterpart, the YPG, and the Kurdish Pershmenga, primarily in the small Turkish-Syrian ...