Western Encounters With Jihadi-Killing Girl Boss Snipers

While information on the Clinton’s project is scant and The Daughters of Kobani is yet to be released, Hollywood Reporter provided some details:

Daughters of Kobani is based on hundreds of hours of interviews and on-the-ground reporting about the all-female Kurdish militia who took on ISIS in Northern Syria and won. Following the unlikely showdown emerged a fighting force who spread their own political vision and established gender equality in their corner of the Middle East and beyond. In the process, they earned the respect — and significant military support — of U.S. Special Operations Forces.

The Clintons are not the first to attempt to tell the story of the YPJ. In 2018 there was a release of Les filles du soleil, written and directed by French actress Eva Husson, which portrayed a French journalist and her interactions with an all-female battalion. Another French production, 2019’s Sœurs d’armes, written by French feminist and arch-secularist Caroline Fourest, focused on two young French women who traveled to Rojava to fight alongside the female militias. In 2020, yet another production on Rojava was released, Hulu’s No Man’s Land, created by Ron Leshem, Maria Feldman, and Eitan Mansuri. This time the protagonist was a French man who journeys to Syria in search of his sister.

There are through lines in all these productions. First, they train their cameras on westerners, with the YPJ and the Syrian Civil War serving as romanticized backdrops. As one reviewer of No Man’s Land noted, “don’t be fooled into thinking that No Man’s Land is, on any level, the story of the YPJ, an elite unit of Kurdish freedom fighters, all women. It’s barely, if at all, a story about the Syrian civil war.”

Second, Kurdish involvement in these productions has been relatively limited. These are not Kurdish stories but stories about westerners’ interactions with the exotic. In the case of the two French productions, the stories seem to be more a thinly veiled salvo in their country’s “cultural wars” than an exploration of the Kurdish movement in Syria.

And, thirdly, they largely obscure the explicitly leftist politics of the Kurds in Syria. In its place we are presented with a generic, nonthreatening, and ultimately vacuous “fight for freedom” perhaps best summed up as “western encounters with Jihadi-killing girl boss snipers.”

Kobanî: A Clinton Production

So where does this leave us with The Daughters of Kobani? The author of the adapted book, journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, is a close ally of Hillary Clinton and the epitome of elite “girl boss” feminism. An advocate of female empowerment through entrepreneurship, her literary debut, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), told the story of an Afghan businesswoman operating under the strictures of the Taliban.

In 2015, she published another tome on female emancipation, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield — an uplifting story of women deployed in combat roles in Afghanistan that earned endorsements and blurbs from such luminaries as Senator John McCain and Sheryl Sandberg.

The Daughters of Kobani, to be fair, won’t be released until next month. However, one might be forgiven for suspecting that the anti-capitalistm of the YPG and YPJ — which draws on the work of Brooklyn-born anarchist Murray Bookchin and the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an organization that has waged war against Ankara since 1984 and that the United States sees as a terrorist organization  —  will be omitted in favor of one that focuses on “girls kicking ass.”

The extensive role of female fighters in Kobanî wasn’t some historical aberration, a curiosity brought about by the peculiarities of the Syrian civil war and discovered by Western elites. In the 1970s and ’80s, several left-wing Kurdish political organizations maintained armed female units, most notably the Iranian-based group Komala. The female fighters of the YPJ can trace their historical lineage back to the PKK, which has a long tradition of female participation.

This brings us to the involvement of the Clintons and the historical irony it presents. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s administration sold and transferred vast amounts of weapons to Turkey, weapons that were primarily used in Ankara’s fight against the PKK. American intelligence proved critical in the capture of Abdullah Öcalan by Turkish special forces in 1999.

Of course, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton aren’t responsible for the actions of Bill Clinton. But it will be more than a little interesting to see how they tackle, for instance, the figure of Öcalan — someone venerated by the fighters of the YPJ yet reviled by the United States.

Kurdish Stories

Many Kurds will be pleased at any mention of their community in western culture considering their all most complete absence. As Kurdish filmmaker Beri Shalmashi points out, “Ten years ago we were pleased just to have the name Kurd mentioned.” I can attest to this myself: I felt an almost irrational excitement when Cotyar Ghazi, a character in the popular Expanse series of novels, was revealed to be of Kurdish descent. There will also be some who feel a sense of satisfaction at the apoplectic rage that news of the production has triggered in the Turkish press.

Yet there is little reason to hope that a Clinton-led production based on a book by an establishment journalist will address the deficits found in earlier efforts to tell the story of Rojava’s female fighters. More than likely, we will get a romantic fantasy of the Kurdish female fighter that obfuscates the real struggle in Syria and incorporates it into a broader “war on terrorism” that serves the interests of militarists like the Clintons.

And the vision of an egalitarian society for which the men and women of Kobanȋ have fought – a vision that is antithetical to Clintonian liberalism – will be hidden, once again, behind a veil of sanitized and exoticized cliches.