A year ago, I was in north-east Syria, in the Kurdish-dominated area known as Rojava, listening to some of the most determined women that I have ever met. On my first day there, I went to a huge conference where one after another, women in Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian dress roused the audience to chants of “Jin! Jiyan! Azadi!” (Woman! Life! Freedom)!.
When I visited, this region of Syria had for more than a decade been governed not by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but by an autonomous administration (the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Daanes). Its commitment to equal rights has been remarkable – every institution it set up relied on power-sharing between men and women. No wonder many of the women I met there sounded optimistic about their future. “This will be a century of women’s freedom,” one said to me. “We are in solidarity with women in resistance throughout the world.”
