Ask anyone outside Kurdistan what they know about Kurdish women and the answer is usually an image: a young woman in fatigues with a rifle, somewhere on the road to Kobanê. That picture went around the world in 2014. But it is only the latest chapter in a much longer story, and the women in it would be the first to say so.
Rulers, poets and historians
Kurdish tradition remembers women who led. Xanzad, a 17th-century princess of Soran, governed from the fortress of Dwîn and is still spoken of in Hewlêr. Mestûre Erdelan (1805 to 1848) of Sine was a poet and the first known woman historian of the Muslim world, writing a chronicle of the Ardalan court in her own name. Adela Xanim of Helebce, called “the princess of the brave” by the British officers who met her a century ago, ran her town’s affairs and its courts. Hapsa Xan of Silêmanî opened one of the first schools for girls in Kurdistan in the 1920s.
The fighters
Margaret George Shello, an Assyrian woman from Duhok, took up arms with the Peshmerga in the 1960s and became a legend across the mountains. Leyla Qasim, a student from Xaneqîn, was executed by the Ba’ath regime in 1974 at the age of 22; her last words are still quoted at every Newroz. In Bakûr, Leyla Zana was jailed for a decade for speaking Kurdish in the Turkish parliament. And in Rojava, the all-women YPJ units that defended Kobanê and later helped free Yazidi women from ISIS made “Kurdish woman” a byword for courage in newspapers from Berlin to Buenos Aires.
The slogan
“Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”, Woman, Life, Freedom, was chanted by Kurdish women’s movements for decades before the world learned it. In September 2022, after Jîna Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman from Seqiz, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, the words spread from her funeral in Rojhilat to every city in Iran and then to the streets of Paris, Toronto and Sydney. It is probably the most widely repeated Kurdish sentence in history.
Everyday symbols
Symbols are also ordinary. The women who keep the dengbêj songs alive; the ones who run the bakeries of Qamişlo and the tailoring workshops of Sine; the mothers in white scarves who gather in Amed on Saturdays for the disappeared; the girls leading the govend line at every wedding with their colourful dresses. At Kurdistan.fm we will keep telling their stories, on air and in this section, and we would love to hear yours. Write to us on the contact page.