Description
The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) fighters became headlines in the Western media for creating a guerrilla made up exclusively of women in the Middle East who fought and defeated the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Syrian War. In January 2018, the Afrin canton in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) became the target of Operation Olive Branch, launched by Turkey. Since then Afrin has been militarily occupied, and Kurdish women (including YPJ fighters) in the region have been increasingly targets of kidnappings, rapes, torture, executions, and mutilations. The environment is also attacked through ecocide, with the cutting of thousands of olive trees that are important to Afrin’s economy and a source of affective connection to the land for the Kurds. Therefore, the Turkish operation works through practices of violence aimed specifically at Kurdish women and their land. Jineolojî, the Science of Women and Life, a paradigm created by the Kurdish Women's Movement, interprets women and nature as colonized, seeking to disrupt this violently imposed inferiority by reclaiming women’s erased knowledge and connection to nature. In this paper, I will examine how Jineolojî is a source of resistance to femicide and ecocide while investigating how YPJ combat the gender violence present in Afrin’s occupation on the ground. The methods supporting this research are a cartography of the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s resistance and a bibliographical review on decolonial approaches, Critical Security Studies, and Gender Studies. Data from news and online interviews with Kurdish women are included.
Keywords: Jineolojî; Kurdish Women’s Movement; Operation Olive Branch; Turkey; YPJ; Women’s Protection Units.
