A Road Unforeseen

August 15, 2016
In this study, Tax (Double Bind) describes Rojava, an autonomous region in Syria, in the greater context of Kurdish struggles throughout the region. In 2014, in the city of Kobane in Rojava, Kurdish militias, including all-female units, drove back the advance of the Islamic State with little help from outside forces. As Tax shows, Rojava is remarkable not just for the large number of women in the military, but for the fact that "people make decisions through local councils and women hold 40 percent of all leadership positions." Much of her work focuses on neighboring Turkey, where Kurds make up 20 percent of the population but are repressed and attacked by governmental forces. The governments of the U.S. and E.U. have done little in response, nominally because the Kurdistan Workers' Party and its leader-in-exile, Abdullah Ãcalan, are considered terrorists. Ãcalan's changing philosophy and the influence of female leaders such as Leyla Zana, a prominent Kurdish activist, have given rise to the concept of "democratic autonomy" now being lived out in Rojava. In a coda, Tax concludes that it remains to be seen how the Rojava experiment in "radical local control... based on democracy, equal citizenship for all, feminism, and ecology" will fare against global capitalism on one hand and "Islamist theocracy" on the other. This is an important look at an unfolding situation little understood in the West.

August 1, 2016
Activist and scholar Tax approaches the Syrian conflict from a unique perspective as she focuses on the role of Kurdish women combatants. She begins with a review of Kurdish history, explaining the original post-WWI split of the Kurdish people between the countries of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, then follows the political and cultural evolution of each group with an eye to their different aims and development as pertaining to women. The Rojava Kurds in Northern Syria, who include an all-women militia that was significant in the rescue of thousands of civilians from Mount Sinjar after a brutal attack by ISIS, are of particular interest, and Tax's study of this female warrior group will likely impress American readers. Tax also exposes the West's many incorrect assumptions about the Kurds and why attempts to classify them as anything other than the heterogeneous people they are is a serious miscalculation. Extensively researched, this is an immensely relevant primer on a complex people whose past and future are critical to the success of peace in their region.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)