by John Man
Advised by a woman acting as a roving ambassador for the Kurds, Aladdin got a Skype call through to Nujin, a burly and soft-spoken YPJ fighter wearing, as you would expect, camouflage fatigues. She talked long and eloquently about the political foundations of the YPJ, then explained why she had joined up.
My journey started with the uprising in Qamishli against Assad’s regime. There was a football match between Arabs and Kurds, and Arabs held up pictures of Saddam Hussein [deposed by the US invasion, captured the previous year]. We were angry, because Saddam Hussein had killed over 100,000 Kurds in 1988.fn2 In Syria, we remembered how Syria had sent Arabs into Kurdistan to divide us from our compatriots in Iraq and Turkey. In response the Kurds held up the Kurdish flag. People started to throw stones. Violence spilled out on to the streets, and the Syrian security forces replied with tanks and helicopters. About 70 died. In addition, the system was against women, so I was ready to get my revenge. People in the community were not used to a woman taking up a gun and fighting next to a man, so it was hard when we started. The religious system, the community, our families, the state – we had to oppose all of them. In 2011, during the ‘Arab Spring’, a few young people of both sexes started to come together, discussing what we could do, and I said ‘This is really the time,’ so without questioning I joined the group, even before the YPJ was founded the next year. The first time I went to Aleppo, that was where I fought first. On the first day of fighting, with my first bullet, I felt something like [words seemed to fail her at this point] … I couldn’t believe what I was doing. But I also saw the cost. Someone called Dayika [‘Mother’] Gulé was working hard to organize the movement, and she was one of the first women martyrs in that circle. That affected me a lot.
Outside Rojava, in a fast-changing imbalance of states, armies, sects and militias, there are no conclusions. Towns are taken, sieges started, sieges ended, towns retaken, and retaken again. Borders open and close. Aid flows, and ceases. Bosses in Moscow and Istanbul and Damascus act as puppet-masters. Where it will end, God or Allah only knows; though there’s no reason to think he does.
But in Rojava itself, city after city – Kobani, Derik, Afrin – has been liberated by Kurds, mostly peacefully. There has been a lot of media interest in the YPJ. On social media, a good-looking young Kurdish woman holds up her hand in a V for Victory sign; in a much-repeated quote, IS fighters supposedly fear the YPJ because they believe ‘they will not go to Heaven if killed by a woman.’ Women’s magazines like Elle and Marie Claire ran long articles on the YPJ. In Australia, the 60 Minutes TV programme carried a documentary about them, ‘Female State’.
Behind the news stories, the women organize and fight, alongside their male colleagues. As Asya Abdullah, co-chair of the Democratic Union Party, says: ‘How can a society be free when its women aren’t free?’fn3 It is, in traditional terms, a limited kind of freedom. As the Kurdish academic Nazand Begikhani – human-rights advocate, specialist in gender-based violence, French-educated, now at Bristol University – told me, these women fighters are forbidden any expression of sexuality: ‘Falling in love is not allowed!’ Yet, she says, ‘they tell me that they feel liberated, unconstrained by family, house and children’.
The result in Rojava is a remarkably avant-garde political structure. It has de facto independence, prepared to defend itself but not take part in the civil war. Women ready to die for their cause play important roles organizing a bottom-up democracy based on local councils. If they are not headed by women, commissions, councils and courts have a joint male–female leadership. Women run research units, academies, schools, health centres, even their own radio station and press association. In the YPJ, women seek out new ways to assert themselves, developing what Öcalan calls Jineologi, ‘woman’s science’, to give them access to knowledge that was once controlled by men. Not all men are happy, but few dare dissent.
The women warriors of the YPJ form more of a female community than the Scythian warrior women, and less than the Amazonian state imagined by the Greeks. They seem to be building something between the two – a core of committed, well-informed, independent women fighters working with their male partners and civilian colleagues to create a safe haven in a chaotic world.
An Enduring Legend
Battling Amazons on a 4th-century BC Greek vase. The rider has reins, but no saddle or stirrups.
On a 5th-century BC Greek vase, a warrior fights an Amazon.
An Amazon riding bareback reaches for an arrow to shoot backwards in a ‘Parthian shot’, named after the people recorded in Iran in the 6th century BC, when this Etruscan bronze was made.
A thousand years later than the Greek images, this 5th- or 6th-century mosaic from Urfa (ancient Edessa), Turkey, shows the Amazon queen Penthesilea drawing her bow with a thumb-ring hidden by her hand.
Greeks v. Amazons Down the Ages
The 5th-century BC Temple of Apollo at Bassae, before it was enclosed for restoration in 2001.
In the Bassae Frieze, a Greek warrior falls at the feet of an Amazon.
On two Roman coffins, Greeks battle Amazons. The Greek legends had migrated, and survived over 700 years as fashionable themes to decorate the sarcophagi of the Roman rich. In the first, from the 2nd century AD, the Greek hero Achilles drags the Amazon queen Penthesilia from her horse.
This second Roman coffin is from the 3rd century AD.
Amazonian Women Buried in Tuva and Siberia
A Pazyryk tomb in the Altai Republic, Russia, near the Mongolian border.
Russian and German archaeologists open the giant Scythian burial mound Arzhan 2 in Tuva.
Working on the remains of a horse-burial in Arzhan 2.
A portrait of the so-called ‘royal couple’ of Arzhan 2, complete with gold-decorated headdresses, capes, jerkins, daggers and boots. Note the woman’s peaked hat, one version of a feature common to many Central Asian peoples.
Tattoos on the skin of the Ice Maiden or Ukok Princess of Altai.
A drawing shows the position of the tattoos and some of their Animal-style motifs.
Gold-plated horses found on a woman’s headdress in Arzhan 2.
In a woman’s skull found in Aymyrlyg, a sword wound shows the violent cause of death.
Golden Grave Goods for Scythian Royals: a Selection from Ukrainian Kurgans, 7th–4th centuries BC
A comb topped by fighting Scythians.
A stag in which the antlers have been turned into a design feature running along its spine, while other animals decorate its flanks.
Saddle decorations in the form of rams’ heads.
A stag with distorted antlers.
Earrings.
A plaque showing a hunter pursuing a hare.
A sword and scabbard decorated with a wolf’s head and intertwined beasts.
A plaque made with repeated imprints of the stag motif, similar to the one top left. Perhaps it had significance for religious rituals or as an identity marker.
The Golden Man – or a Golden Woman?
Though seen so widely in Kazakhstan that this is virtually a symbol of the country, the Golden Man is so slight of build that he may in fact have been a woman. Towering headdresses were worn by aristocratic women across much of Central Asia.
California: The Mythical Island of New World Amazons
In the early 16th century, the Spaniards who first explored the west coast of the Americas were entranced by European novels based on the idea that Queen Califia and her Amazon warriors lived in some New World island. They named California after her and guessed that the peninsula of Baja California, now part of Mexico, was her island. The belief lasted for over a century, as this 1676 map shows.
The Amazon: A Legend, a River, an Image
Orellana’s Challenge 1: 1,200 kilometres inland, the Amazon is still a freshwater sea. Here, its sediment-rich ‘white’ waters from the Andes meet the nutrient-poor Rio Negro. Orellana, the first to explore the Amazon, came here in June 1542, noted that the waters were ‘black as ink’ and
named the river accordingly.
Folklore trumps reality in this 1598 woodcut of ‘Amazons in their mating season’, in a landscape that owes nothing to the rainforest that was their supposed home.
Orellana’s Challenges 2 and 3: the people, the environment. It takes expertise to live in the rainforest. In the 1980s, this Waorani man, Tedikawae, was living in the rainforest south of the Napo. He has killed a nocturnal curassow using a blow-gun and darts tipped with curare, a nerve-poison – tools and skills that evolved over centuries.
Over the years, Amazons became stock figures in theatre. This is a 19th-century stage Amazon in ‘traditional’ costume: loose skirt, cross-gartering, Phrygian cap and bow.
An Amazon as seen on a late 19th-century educational card included in a box of French chocolates.
Rubens Shows the Horrors of War
In his Battle of the Amazons (c. 1622), Rubens symbolized the chaos and mindless violence of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).
Women Warriors Yesterday and Today
An 1890 German lithograph shows Dahomey’s ‘Corps of Amazons’.
Before take-off in Moscow to fly across Russia in 1938, the three women pilots pose before their long-range bomber, Rodina (Motherland). Marina Raskova, founder of Russia’s all-female air squadrons, is on the right.
A team of ‘Night Witches’ in front of their Po-2 biplanes.
Kurdish women fighters in a march-past near Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, July 2014.
Lajos Kassai, the Hungarian who revived and popularized the sport of horseback archery. He has taught many women across Europe and the US, who find the results empowering and inspiring.
Zana Cousins-Greenwood, co-founder of the Centre of Horseback Combat, Hemel Hempstead, west of London.
Pettra Engeländer, who trained with Kassai and now runs her own horseback archery centre about 100 kilometres north-east of Frankfurt, Germany.
An Amazonian Princess Saves the World
The first appearance of Wonder Woman inside All Star Comics No. 8 in December 1941 was followed by this cover appearance a month later. Though an Amazonian princess, Diana, she springs up as an all-American heroine to help with the war effort.
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