The Clintons Are Making a TV Show About Female Kurdish Fighters. That’s Absurd.
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are producing a new TV series about female Kurdish fighters. We can expect a sanitized production that somehow fails to mention that YPJ forces in Rojava are leftists who oppose everything the Clintons represent.
Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton discuss their new book, The Book of Gutsy Women in Los Angeles, California, 2019. (Emma McIntyre / Getty Images)
Of the many battles in the decade-long Syrian civil war, few have captured international attention like the Battle of Kobanî. Fought between September 2014 and January 2015 for control of the predominately Kurdish town of Kobanî, the battle pitted the then-ascendant Islamic State against the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), a left-wing Kurdish militia that controlled several predominately Kurdish enclaves in northern Syria (known to Kurds as Rojava — the west). The YPG’s all-women wing, the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), featured prominently.
The image of young female fighters resisting the advance of ISIS, a group that enforced the most draconian forms of patriarchal rule and routinely used rape as a weapon of war, inspired many on the international left. Kurdish militias decimated ISIS’s ranks while building a radical enclave based on principles of direct democracy.
Yet the Kurds have also attracted some unlikely supporters — namely, those who would rather focus on what they’ve been against than what they’re fighting for.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.