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I belong to an organization called the Centre for Secular Space which believes it is of critical importance for women’s rights that religion, any religion, be separate from the state and from any method of governance. It’s fine to have religious organizations and it’s fine to have churches and temples and mosques and all that but religious ideology should not be the basis of government and this is the only place in the Middle East that has explicitly said that at a period of rising fundamentalism.

You’ve spoken about how there isn’t a lot of writing about the Rojava women, at least not in Western media.

I started writing this book in 2014. During the battle of Kobane is when I first got really obsessed with this subject and started to research it in a thorough way. At that point there were pictures of women guerrillas all over the place. I’ve seen pictures of women guerrillas before. This is different because they’re also leading society in a different way. They’re not just being used in a fight because the fighters need more people — they’re being called upon to fight because of an ideology that says women must learn how to defend themselves and take charge in society.

You say in the book’s introduction that the story of these women hasn’t yet been told because it doesn’t fit into Western narratives. What do you mean by that?

The Western narrative has always tended to be binary. It’s us against them, at least in the United States. When I was growing up the narrative was a Cold War narrative, basically. We were all supposed to fight communism wherever it cropped up and anything that remotely had anything to do with that was sort of demonized. And in 1989, the whole communist bloc collapsed as a result of its own incompetence and military over-extension and political lack of credibility to the people who lived inside of it and that destroyed the narrative. People who are opinion-makers in Washington looked around for another enemy. “Who’s going to be the next enemy? Russia’s gone.”