Since the beginning, Kurdish women have played an integral role in the Kurdish movement. They fight and they protest, they vote and they get elected to office. And somewhere along the way they achieved a (very complicated, highly controversial, maybe lasting or even replicable) liberation.

Sakine Cansiz, one of the women killed on January 9, was a founding member of the PKK ( ed.-- all of the names in this story, except for those belonging to public figures, have been changed). Leyla Soylemez and Fidan Dogan were younger activists, working from Europe on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Dogan was active in the Kurdish National Congress, and had just returned from meetings in Brussels. They were not holding guns or wearing the khaki uniform of a guerilla fighter, nor were they crouched in bunkers in the Qandil mountains. They were in a small office in Paris and their killer used a silencer. But still, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to them as "terrorists."

Some two decades have passed since female recruits to the PKK became a standard phenomenon. It's impossible to know how many have joined the group, but in her book, Blood and Belief, Aliza Marcus charts Kurdish society's reaction to the PKK's women fighters -- a mixture of shock and pride. Marcus' account shows how abruptly and remarkably the movement grew. By joining the women commit themselves to the harsh winters and bloody summers in Qandil. They will carry out attacks, and they will almost certainly die in the mountains. But they still go.

Women join the PKK to escape poverty. They flee a conservative society where domestic violence is common and there is little opportunity for women. Other female guerillas are university graduates. They study Kurdish history and Ocalan, as well as the Marxist theories at the root of the PKK, and consider fighting as much an intellectual exercise as a physical one. Many join because of relatives in prison, and others join to avoid prison. Fighting in the mountains, they argue, is less dangerous than protesting at home.

In the mountains, men and women study together, everything from Ocalan's writings to music to weapons training. They eat together and, when it comes time, fight together. They are forbidden from having sex, getting married, or having children -- a focus on chastity that both eliminates distraction and comforts those at home who, guerilla or not, attach a woman's purity to family honor. If they break these rules, they are expelled or arrested or, some say, executed. Ocalan's reasons for including women, whether for women's empowerment or for strength in numbers, are debatable. Few minorities have the luxury of alienating women from their cause entirely. But regardless of his motives, Ocalan's women have changed the Kurdish movement. "To understand feminism in Kurdish society you have to look less at the PKK and more at the BDP," Marcus told me on the phone last year. She's referring to the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, founded in 2008, which mandates that 40 percent of its representatives be women. The connection between female PKK guerilla and BDP parliamentarian -- a more or less direct line that is both a triumph and a curse -- is the complicated foundation of Kurdish feminism.