Rhino: Agencies – Thousands of women demonstrated in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli on Monday to demand that the new Islamist rulers respect women’s rights and to denounce Turkish-backed military campaigns in Kurdish-controlled areas in the country’s north.
Many protesters waved the green flag of the Women’s Protection Units (YPG), an offshoot of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) that Turkey considers a threat to its national security and wants to disband immediately.
“We demand women’s rights from the new state … and women should not be excluded from freedom in this system,” said Sawsan Hussein, a women’s rights activist.
Syria’s dominant Kurdish factions espouse a program that emphasizes socialism and feminism in contrast to the beliefs of the conservative Sunni Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which was once an al-Qaeda affiliate.
Turkey sees the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is considered a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.
Hostilities between the SDF and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) have escalated since Assad’s ouster, and the SDF has been driven out of the northern city of Manbij. Syrian Kurdish leaders say Turkish forces are mobilizing for an attack on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)-controlled city of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, on the Turkish border.
Syrians widely fear that the new administration in Damascus will move toward hardline Islamist rule and marginalize the presence of minorities and women in public life.
Obaida Arnaout, a spokesman for Syria’s transitional government, stated last week that the physical and physiological nature of women makes them unqualified for some government jobs.
“Yes, to supporting the Women’s Protection Forces, yes to maintaining and preserving the rights and gains of the women’s revolution in northern and eastern Syria,” Hamrin Ali, an official in the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria, told Reuters at Monday’s demonstrations.
