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A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State
A Road Unforeseen Women Fight the Islamic State Author:Meredith Tax "A remarkable democratic experiment. . . . A feminist army . . . has carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State. How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by the international community, even, largely, by the International Left?"?David Graeber, author of Debt: The Fir... more »st 5,000 Years, in the GuardianIn war-torn Northern Syria, a democratic society?based on secularism, ethnic inclusiveness, and gender equality?has won significant victories against the Islamic State, with women on the front lines as fierce warriors and leaders.A Road Unforeseen recounts the dramatic, under-reported history of the Rojava Kurds, whose all-women militia was instrumental in the 2014 perilous mountaintop rescue of tens of thousands of civilians besieged in Iraq. Up to that point, the Islamic State had seemed invincible. Yet these women helped vanquish them, bringing the first half of the refugees to safety within twenty-four hours. Who are the revolutionary women of Rojava, what are their chances for survival under attack from all sides, and what lessons can we learn from their heroic story?Meredith Tax is a writer and political activist. Author, most recently, of Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, she was founding president of Women's WORLD, a global free speech network of feminist writers, and cofounder of the PEN American Center's Women's Committee and the International PEN Women Writers' Committee. She is currently board chair of the Centre for Secular Space and lives in New York.« less