Kurdistan

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. 

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.