‘Being a woman,” says the woman standing on the stage in front of me, “doesn’t mean I am just here to raise children. Being a woman means that I am here to write history. Women can speak. We can sing. Nobody will silence us.” There is a roar of approval around me.
I’m sitting in a huge conference hall in Hasakah, a city in north-east Syria. The woman on the stage, a singer called Mizgîn Tahir, has bobbed curly hair and wears boots and a skirt, while the women around me are dressed in varied styles – some in floor-length Kurdish dresses with sparkling embroidery, others with headscarves and plain coats, others sporting Yazidi headdresses with hanging beads. All are cheering. Tahir has now finished her speech and is about to return to her chair, but the women in the hall won’t let her. “Sing for us!” they call. “Sing!”
