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And how could we overlook the reasons why IS has focused their forces on Kobanê? The city is the centre to one of the three regions —the other two being Afrin and Jazira— which have constituted themselves as ‘democratic autonomous regions’ for a confederation of ‘Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens’, as stated in the preamble to the extraordinary Charter of Rojava (as Western/Syrian Kurdistan is called). This is a text that speaks of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy; of equality and ‘environmental sustainability’. In Rojava feminism is not only embodied in the female fighters, but also in the principle of equal participation at every organ of self-government, which questions patriarchy on a daily basis. And this self-government, in spite of multiple contradictions and under extremely hard conditions, expresses a real commitment to cooperation between equal and free people. Even more: being coherent with the anti-nationalistic turn within Öcalan’s PKK, with which the YPG/YPJ are linked, there is a clear rejection not only of any kind of ethnic absolutism or religious fundamentalism, but also of any nationalistic derive of the Kurdish people’s struggle. And this is happening in the Middle East of today, where people slaughter or are slaughtered on religious or ethnic grounds.
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