Meral Çiçek
“ISIS and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey are ‘partners in crime’, with regard to the assassinations of women politicians,” writes Meral Çiçek for Yeni Özgür Politika.
Hind Latif al-Khadir and Sa’da Faysal al-Hermas, two young female politicians and elected representatives of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) were abducted by force on Friday night.
They were murdered and their heads were cut off. Their bodies were found on the Saturday morning by the road. ISIS claimed the assassination one day later.
Hind Latif al-Khadir had just a few days before condemned the occupation attacks of Turkey as follows: “Our purpose is to save the North of Syria as a whole from the occupation of Turkey. We will liberate all of the occupied lands from Afrin (Efrin) to Ras al-Ayn (Serêkaniyê).” she was murdered only a few days after this statement.
Sa’da Faysal al-Hermas was a young woman in the People’s Assembly of Til El Shayir sub-district in Shedade region, in the south of al-Hasakah province. She was the co chair of the Economic Committee for the Shedade region.
Shedade has been besieged, first by Al-Nursa, then by ISIS. Three years later, on 19 February 2016, it was liberated by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The women of the region, who had to wear the black hijab under the occupation of the jihadist gangs, had begun to confidently take part in politics through the self-governance mechanisms built after liberation. Women have turned into active participants and organised as the leading force of the democratic power.
Hind Latif al-Khadir, the Co-Chair of the Tal al-Chayir council and Sa’da Faysal al-Hermas, the Co-Chair of the Economy Committee had taken their parts as two leading women in the process of the social and political change in Shedade.
Both women were Arab, as Shedade is mostly populated by Arabs and Kurds. Hind Latif al-Khadir and Sa’da Faysal al-Hermas had never given up on the political work in the assembly despite the threats they have been receiving before their assassinations.
ISIS and the AKP of Turkey are partners in crime with regard to the assassinations of women politicians. The assassination of Hevrîn Xelef, in October 2019, the targeted killings of women in Kobane (Kobanê) in June 2020 and the final assassination incidents that took place in Shedade (Şedadê) (in Al-Hasakah) should be seen as part of this femicide mentality. The AKP shows the way and ISIS applies it.
Kurdish woman politicians were murdered brutally first by the AKP in North and East Syria. ISIS now applies this model proposed by the AKP in the areas where they still have active cells. Two gang mentality organisations become partners of misogyny.
These assassinations target systematically, woman politicians, because these gangs, which base their ideology on patriarchy, want to destroy women’s struggle for freedom.
Moreover, they aim at the annihilation of the democratic autonomous system, that is the democratic nation model, built in North and East Syria, since women lead this democratic reconstruction, they are targeted twice over.
Both gang organisations impose slavery, both to the women and to the peoples of the region, especially to the Kurds. They refrain from no depths of brutality in order to prevent the people of the region from achieving a free and equal life. Such a fascist character they have; they represent the absolute darkness of humanity.
To tear down this darkness, the women’s freedom struggle and the leadership of women in the revolution shall be raised.
The femicides under the partnership of the AKP and ISIS can only be stopped with the increase of the opportunities for women to participate in democratic politics, both in a qualitative and in a quantitative sense.
We should strengthen women’s collective power and give our shoulder to the mission of our comrades, of our leaders, who have been so brutally taken away from us.
