HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Have you ever had one of those days, so frustrating, where you trip and hurt your toe, or the letter carrier is late, or the milk is spoiled. Yeah. SO awful.
Now let me introduce you to Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. She’s seen some truly bad days. And some incredible courage. Women dealing with life and death, and defending their families and homes. In a way we can never imagine.
Instyle listed Gayle as one of their 50 “badass women of the year.”
The magazine said: The author and determined reporter writes real accounts of women who support their war-torn communities against all odds. Her third book, The Daughters of Kobani, about those who took on ISIS and won, has already earned praise from the likes of Angelina Jolie. Tzemach Lemmon says, “It’s a universal story about people up against a wall who rise up for something greater.”
So listen: Gayle’s the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana , about a young entrepreneur who supported her community under the Taliban. Ashley’s War is currently being developed into a major motion picture at Universal.
Her new book,The Daughters of Kobani tells the story of what ISIS has left in its wake: the most far-reaching experiment in women’s equality in the least likely place in the world. It reveals the story of young women who have been battling ISIS town by town, street by street since 2013.
Listen: These young women served as America’s ground force in the fight to defeat the Islamic State and The Daughters of Kobani tells for the first time the story of how they came to serve as America’s partner.
Listen: In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women’s rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it.
From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women’s equality a reality by fighting–house by house, street by street, city by city–the men who bought and sold women.
Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, The Daughters of Kobani is the unforgettable story of the women of the Kurdish militia that improbably became part of the world’s best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria.
Rigorously reported and powerfully told, The Daughters of Kobani shines a light on a group of women intent on not only defeating the Islamic State on the battlefield but also changing women’s lives in their corner of the Middle East and beyond.
Gayle and I have talked on the phone, and she’s wonderful, and as I asked her more and more about this incredible story--it all come down to one question: How did this happen?
And I asked her to write her answer so we all could hear.
Inside Kobani
Every great story starts with an unanswerable question. The question I set out to answer with The Daughters of Kobani: How on earth did one of the most far-reaching experiments in women’s equality anywhere in the world get created by women who fought — and crushed — ISIS? Who were these women and how on earth did they come to fight for women’s rights and against ISIS as America’s partner?
Kobani in 2014 became the first town ever to hand ISIS a battlefield loss. And women played a big part in that. It was like David versus Goliath, only David was also a woman.
I spent the next few years getting to know these women, who also were daughters, sisters, and friends, and coming to realize they weren’t superhuman at all. They were women who felt they had to stand up and rewrite the rules governing their lives in order to protect their towns, their home and their families. Like so many of our daughters, mothers and sisters, they simply stood up because they felt that someone had to and that a world in which women could be bought and sold should not be allowed to stand.
One story always stayed with me when describing the women I met in this book to my friends at home: Azeema was a swashbuckling, funny, chain-smoking thirty-something who led men and women in battle against ISIS. One day she was in the middle of planning her next move against ISIS when her phone rang. She picked it up immediately, thinking it was her commander. Only it was actually her sister, calling from a few towns over to check in on her. “Come on,” she told her sister, “stop calling me while I am working! I promised you I would call you when the battle was over. Now stop calling!”
We all have had that moment when we are trying to finish something and our mom or our sister call to check in! This was the most extreme version of that and I wanted to show the humanity and the love of family even amid the inhumanity of war against ISIS.
These women wanted justice and they wanted equal rights and they were focused on war really only as a means to achieving a political end: a world in which Kurds governed themselves, practiced environmentally conscious, grassroots, town hall-style democracy -- to the left of Bernie Sanders -- focused on sharing of resources, and kept women’s equality right at the center of all their governing. Every town they took over had a woman and a man as co-head. Every town had a women’s council. Women served in security forces, too.
I set out to tell the story and met women more comfortable with power and less apologetic about leading than women I have seen anywhere in the world. Honestly, it looks different when women lead. These women stopped the men who bought and sold women, and they carried that swagger and that sense of self with them. They weren’t focused on how men felt about it. They were focused on making gains that lasted.
We have never seen stories of women as universal. A story with more than one female character gets labeled a “women’s story” and immediately becomes relevant to only half the population. We must change that.
When I asked Rojda, one of the commanders who worked with U.S. special operations to push ISIS out of its so-called capital in Raqqa, why they started the all-women unit if they already had full equality according to their ideology, she answered me this, “We just didn’t want men taking credit for our work.”
I hope you will love The Daughters of Kobani. It is a privilege for me to share this history and an honor to bring it to your community of readers.
HANK: And it is a privilege for us to hear it. And now, Reds and readers, will you look at YOUR life a bit differently? Gayle will try to stop by today--what would you like to tell her?
And you can get this powerful and life-changing book here. (And scroll down for the link to her amazing Ted Talk. And soon you will hear who has optioned it for film. More I cannot say.)
More about Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: She serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, along with private sector leadership roles in emerging technology and national security, began writing about entrepreneurship in conflict and post-conflict zones while studying for her MBA at Harvard following a decade covering politics at the ABC News Political Unit. This work from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Liberia, Bosnia and beyond has been published by the World Bank, Harvard Business School, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and CNN, among others. Following MBA study, she led public policy analysis during the global financial crisis at the global investment firm PIMCO.
Lemmon is a frequent speaker on national security topics, including at the Aspen Security Forum and TED forums, and has given talks at West Point, ODNI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the National Infantry Museum.
Her TED Talk on Ashley’s War and the reshaping of the hero story to include women has received more than a million views worldwide. She regularly appears on MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and National Public Radio. Along with her national security work, she has reported and written extensively on topics including child marriage in the United States for PBS NewsHour and on school choice, single moms and the power and importance of girls’ ambition for The Atlantic. Lemmon holds an MBA from Harvard and received the Dean’s Award for her work on women’s entrepreneurship. In addition to serving as a Robert Bosch Fellow in Germany, she served as a Fulbright scholar in Spain, on the board of the international aid organization Mercy Corps and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. She speaks Spanish, German and French and is conversant in Dari and Kurmanci.
