“A revolution within a revolution.”
Her War: Women vs. ISIS
The YPJ (Women's Protection Units) is an all-female splinter group of the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Kurdish-majority movement fighting the “Islamic State” in Syria. Previously unheard of until 2013, the YPJ grew with waves of volunteers defending their neighbourhoods from ISIS expansion in Syria’s poor northern farmlands. On top of fighting the world’s largest terror group, the YPJ seeks to build “a new society”, based on gender equality, democracy, socialism and even environmentalism, despite opposition from conservative forces in the region.
We were the first foreign film crew to be granted permission to live on a YPJ base during training, 3 km from the frontline with ISIS. Unbeknown to me then, this film was to be the first in a series profiling the YPJ/YPG, as they expanded from three besieged patches of territory in the north to take control of roughly 1/3 of Syria. In July 2017 - a feat that was nearly impossible to imagine in the making of “Her War” - we met some of the same girls again, as they stormed the capital of ISIS, Raqqa (The Road to Raqqa).
