Kurdish women fighters

(October 19, 2014)

Kurdish women are on the battlefield, raising their arms against Daa-esh. "Daa-esh" is how Arabs refer to ISIS. And ISIS doesn't like it. So, let's go for it full-throttle!

The BBC Arabic had a call-in show all about those female fighters.

Here was an on-line comment they read out on the air: These Kurdish women fighters are changing the world's opinion of the Middle Eastern woman! These fighters are showing strength and perseverance.

One of the Kurdish ladies interviewed promised that: we are going to fight. And we are not going to be swept aside by the men later on, but be able to claim a fair place in society (because the BBC Arabic moderator had been hinting that.)

Then they started talking about why young Muslims in Europe end up leaving to fight with Daa-esh. Many of the comments revolved around: they don't feel accepted and they don't feel like citizens in Europe.

Some of these young Muslims are girls. Someone said: these girls are being tricked with lies about Islam and lies about how they will go to Heaven if they help Daa-esh.

Then, a camera went around Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, and asked random people on the street what they think of the Kurdish women fights. The random men said: yes, if there's a need, the women should help out.

But the random women picked said: sure, the Kurdish women can help their husbands at home, but not in the battlefields.

Only one man said: the Kurdish women can help with logistics and maybe do the cooking. Overall, the men were more anxious for the women to fight than the women themselves.

The moderator asked: why are girls leaving all their well-being and contentment and freedoms and Europe, to go fight for Daa-esh.

Said an expert: the crisis of integration and racism and the search for a better life and wanting to serve the word of the Quran, all these things are involved. And then there's also women who listen to what their men tell them to do.

Moderator: you say some of these girls are searching for a better life. But how can you say that when they are entering a war zone?

Expert: well, some of these girls are in hard conditions in Europe. Maybe they fail their studies. And then the expert listed some other problems that I couldn't understand. He concluded: with all these problems, there's an idea that there's another life out there, a better life, an Islamic life. All these things play a role in moving these girls towards a better life.

Moderator: some statistics say that a big proportion of Muslim European girls who left for Syria are from France. What is up with that?

Expert: yes, it gets in the news a lot that they arrest girls on the French border who are on their way to Syria or other places. Right now, France has banned some extremist websites to try to limit the flow of information and the networking that is giving these girls the knowledge of how and where they can access routes to Syria.

The expert was called Dr. Khattab.

Some one during the program also said: There's a crisis of Islamic integration in Europe. For example, in Britain, many of the Muslim men who go to Syria are coming out of prison. They had already been in trouble with the law. In France, in Austria, it is women who are not working (?). There is racism, and there are women who want to wear a niqab. And there's people who are just very mad and they want to go live in a Muslim paradise.