This week on Great in the Sack: When Misogyny Leads to Mayhem, we unpack a revolution born not in peace, but in the wreckage of war—where colonial borders, religious authoritarianism, and patriarchal power all collided. And somehow, out of that fire, a feminist experiment began to breathe.

Welcome to Rojava—northeastern Syria—where Kurdish women took up arms against ISIS...& began rewriting society itself.

Drawing from the radical philosophy of Abdullah Öcalan, a former Marxist turned jailed Kurdish thinker, Rojava’s political model—democratic confederalism—is a bold rejection of both Western imperialism and religious authoritarianism. Here, power is decentralized. Ethnic divisions are challenged. And women? They are co-chairs, commanders, lawmakers, and rebels. Every council is led by one man and one woman. Every major decision is filtered through a lens of gender equality.

But this revolution didn’t just spring up—it’s a direct response to decades of betrayal. Colonial legacies carved up Kurdistan, denying the Kurds a homeland and pushing them into the margins of nation-states that treated them as problems to be solved—or erased. Add to that the rise of armed Islamist groups enforcing Sharia law with an iron fist, and you get the perfect storm for radical, necessary reinvention.

We explore the tension between Islamic fundamentalism and female autonomy, how the Rojava model challenges both capitalist modernity and sectarian domination, and why this revolution—still under siege from every direction—may be one of the most important feminist stories of the 21st century.

Red Crescent Rojava: https://hskurd.org/en/ 

Emergency aide for Rojava:

https://heyvasor.com/en/2024/12/03/emergency-aid-for-rojava/#pll_switcher 

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show notes:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/11/26/group-denial/repression-kurdish-political-and-cultural-rights-syria?utm_ 

Conflict Between Turkey and Armed Kurdish Groups | Global Conflict Tracker 

https://hawarnews.com/en/mother-of-martyr-hevrin-khalaf-my-daughters-killers-are-stillroaming-free   

https://youtu.be/cMfJRnWu52Y  

Wayback Machine  

Timeline: The Kurds’ Long Struggle With Statelessness 

https://nypost.com/2024/03/30/long-mistreated-by-iraq-the-kurds-need-americas-attention-now/?utm_source=chatgpt.com  

Turkey: Facing a New Millennium: Coping With Intertwined Conflicts, Amikam Nachmani, p. 210, 2003  

Turkey Claims That Syria's Kurds Are Terrorists. Should Anyone Believe Them? 

The Kurdistan Memory Programme  

D'Alema: Abdullah Öcalan is right. Solving the Kurdish question is crucial for peace in the Middle East - The Kurdish Center for Studies