Kurdistan

WLUML is pleased to announce it has joined forces with the Women's Alliance for Kurdistan, Iraq and Syria, and will march with the Alliance on the 7th March to call for the liberation of all women under “IS” control on the occasion of International Women’s Day. We invite you to march with us and join the call to end violence against women.

By Gönül Kaya

Gönül Kaya is a journalist and representative of the Kurdish women’s movement. This article is the transcript of her speech at the Jineology Conference in March 2014 in Cologne, Germany.

Published 14 October 2014

Fighters for the all-women YPJ militia in northern Syria say they are fighting “a revolution of woman.”

Hundreds of Kurds gathered in a Turkish border town on Tuesday for the funerals of four women killed fighting the Islamic State (I.S.) group, while across the border a Kurdish female militia is playing a leading role in defending Kobani.

Reuters has reported the four coffins that were lowered into the ground in the town of Suruc contained the bodies of fighters from the Kurdish Women's Protection Units (YPJ) – the female brigade of the leftist YPG militia.

“We will avenge … those women who were sold as slaves in the markets of the ISIS (I.S.),” the YPJ said in a statement last Wednesday. 

Honour Killing is a daily crime committed against women and young girls in the Region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Although hundreds of women fall victims of Honour Killings every year, the authorities seems unable or unwilling to offer them any protection.  According to official statistics in the last four months of 2014 alone, 14 women have been murdered.

Toutkhal: Kurdistan is one of Iraq’s rare success stories; autonomous from Baghdad since 1991, the region has recently enjoyed an oil boom that’s fuelled foreign investment unknown elsewhere in the country.

And recently Iraqi Kurdistan has been looking closely at its human rights record. Two years ago Female Genital Mutilation was banned, as part of a wide-ranging law to improve women’s rights, and since then the rate of FGM has fallen dramatically.

But how have they achieved this? Kurdistan is very much the exception.

Au Kurdistan irakien, des femmes menacées de crimes d'honneur passent des années dans des refuges. Rencontres. (D'Erbil, Irak) Prostrée sur sa chaise, Noora [les prénoms ont été modifiés], 19 ans, articule d'une voix feutrée :« Cela fait trois ans que je vis dans des refuges. Si je sors, on me tue. »

First-time filmmaker, 70-year-old Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, has made it her mission to bring visibility to honor killing in Iraqi Kurdistan. Within that context, her documentary highlights the advocacy of women who are catalyzing change in the region.

Nearly 200 women from 40 women’s organizations staged a demonstration in front of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) building in Erbil calling to amend a Personal Status Law article allowing polygamy.
Nahla Hussain, militante des droits des femmes, leader de la ligue des femmes du parti communiste Kurde et mère de deux enfants, a été décapitée chez elle à Kirkuk dans le nord de l'Iraq.
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