Kurdish female fighters are once again pawns in a bigger political game | Ece Temelkuran
In August 2014 Marie Claire published an unusual photo shoot. The women in the stylised images were not in fancy haute couture, but instead wore khaki jumpsuits and held machine guns. These were the female fighters of the YPG - the main Kurdish group of the Syrian Democratic Forces - in Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria.
These women were praised for their bravery in fighting against the most unfathomable evil of our times, Isis. The world championed them as an antidote to the death cult originating from the Middle East, which spread its ideas to Europe and the US. At the same time, the women remained quite invisible to Turkish audiences, because of their connection to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' party) which has been designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the EU.
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