A hint of defiance, a look of liberated joy: that’s the expression etched on the face of this foreign fighter. Ivana Hoffman, 19, did not leave Germany to fight for Islamic State, of course, but for the Kurdish struggle.

In the photograph being widely distributed, she stands in front of the emblematic hammer-and-sickle icon. Hoffman was a communist, fighting to “defend the revolution”, she said. What is being forgotten is that the great war of northern Syria is not simply a defensive struggle against Isis’s barbarism but a revolution in its own right, and the likes of Hoffman are heroes of the left.

Consider what beacons Syria’s liberated Kurdish cantons are in the Middle East. The region is dominated by western-backed dictatorships, fundamentalist tyrannies and murderous reactionary terrorists. Israel boasts it is the Middle East’s sole liberal democracy, a claim fatally undermined by the country’s subjugation and occupation of Palestine.

In northern Syria, the struggle is led by the Democratic Union party, a radically democratic, feminist, leftwing force and an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ party. Once Stalinist, the PKK has evolved, now drawing inspiration from the libertarian socialism of the US theoretician Murray Bookchin. “This is a genuine revolution,” according to the anarchist thinker David Graeber, who has visited the cantons. He has spoken of how the eventual aim is to give all citizens six weeks of police training, with the idea of abolishing the police. In a Syria being shredded by a secular dictatorship and reactionary fundamentalists, is an anarchist enclave being forged?

Isis is notorious for its misogyny. Appropriate, then, that its arch-enemies are radical feminists

Isis is notorious for its misogyny. Appropriate, then, that its archenemies are radical feminists. The Kurdish activist Mehmet Aksoy explains to me that this is, in part, a “woman’s revolution”. It is not driven simply by women’s oppression and exploitation in the Middle East, and by their lack of representation in politics and civil society, but by the PKK’s own reading of history.

“The first revolution, the agricultural revolution, was instituted by women,” he says, “and the first counter-revolution and the first negative hierarchies were created by men.” In one pamphlet the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan – now languishing in Turkish jail – writes: “Liberating life is impossible without a radical women’s revolution which would change mentality and life.” He coins the concept of “total divorce”, or “the ability to divorce from the five thousand years old culture of male domination”.

A year ago, a “social contract” established the underlying principles of the three cantons, pledging to build “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs”. Power would rest with governing councils “elected by popular vote”. All minorities were to be protected and given equal rights.

While keeping its critical faculties intact, the left should be seizing on any democratic experiment that deviates from the prevailing consensus. The Middle East seems too exotic, too divorced from the everyday realities of western societies to be of much relevance. But there has been all too little examination of an attempt to create a different, radically democratic society.

As these armies fight the most violently reactionary mass political force on Earth, much of the radical left flinches away because it fears the struggle’s relationship to western imperialism. It is an inescapable fact that if these Kurdish freedom fighters were struggling against western forces, theirs would be a cause célèbre.

Western allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have proved crucial in exporting fundamentalist ideology

Not that objections to the catastrophic role of western imperialism in the region should be dismissed, of course, whether it be support for the brutal despots in Saudi Arabia or for the democracy-usurping junta in Egypt, the oppression of the Palestinian people or catastrophic wars such as the invasion of Iraq, all of which were crucial to the rise of extremist jihadi groups in the first place. But this democratic struggle is itself threatened by the west.

The PKK is still designated a terrorist organisation by powers such as the US. Turkey, a key Nato state, waged a dirty war in the 80s and 90s, wiping 3,000 villages off the map during the offensive, according to Human Rights Watch.

Turkey facilitated the rise of Isis, allowing its militants to flood across its porous border with Syria. With a de facto Kurdish state already existing in northern Iraq, Turkey fears another liberated enclave that could embolden its own Kurdish minority. Western allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have proved crucial in exporting fundamentalist ideology, as well as funds and arms for jihadi groups.

Isis is the bastard child of Assad’s repression of the Syrian people, catastrophic western intervention and the scandalous role of the Arab despots. That socialists and anarchists are helping to drive it back should be a source of immense pride for the international left.

Maybe – just maybe – this struggle contains the seeds of a different Middle East. The region’s once powerful secular leftists were eclipsed by religious reactionaries long ago. But in northern Syria a new society could be hatching, run on radically democratic and feminist lines. Isis already fears it. If it succeeds, in the aftermath of the abortive Arab spring, it could give heart to all those who crave freedom.