Author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (MBA 2006) has been here before—speaking with palpable enthusiasm and urgency about women who have defied cultural norms and changed the world around them through acts of bravery and heroism. In her first book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), a young Afghan woman becomes an unlikely entrepreneur, supporting her siblings when her father and brother are forced to flee the Taliban. Ashley’s War (2015) centers on the US military’s Cultural Support Teams, a pilot program that inserted women alongside Special Operations forces fighting in Afghanistan.

And now, in The Daughters of Kobani, Lemmon introduces readers to Kurdish female fighters who helped lead the defeat of ISIS in northeastern Syria. “The story is not just about war,” Lemmon says on a Zoom call from her home. “It’s also about these women’s battle for equality and representative government—women who were catapulted onto the global stage by the fight against men who bought and sold women.”

What was different about writing Daughters as compared to your two earlier books?

Maybe I’ll start with what they have in common: The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and Ashley’s War are also stories of valor and courage, about communities of underestimated women who rise to the moment in service to something greater. What was different with Daughters was the global implications of the story. You have a group of women fighting terrorists, as the David versus the Goliath of ISIS—only David is a woman.

The second difference is the story is existential. Their homes were about to be overrun by extremists who truly saw women as things to be bought and sold. These women said, “I will die before these people take over our neighborhood.” They led men. They led from the front—as snipers, as commanders, as the people the Americans were talking to—in the push to rid the world of the threat of the Islamic State.

You depict street-by-street battles and larger, strategic operations in vivid detail, giving readers a real sense of place. Can you tell us more about the reporting you did for this book?

I was there for the Battle of Raqqa in the summer of 2017, which is where the book starts. I had my first experience interviewing one of the commanders then, who was walking around like she’s in Central Park but pointing at a car bomb that was still smoking, saying, “ISIS just targeted us.”

The other battles depicted in the book were reconstructed from interviews, using the perspectives of multiple people. I made seven reporting trips to northeastern Syria in all, between 2017 and 2020, along with conducting more than 100 hours of interviews in Syria, the United States, and northern Iraq.

What is it like to travel to Syria?

It becomes a home away from home, in its own way. You’re there every few months and you notice which stores and restaurants have opened or closed. You become connected to the feel and the smells. The book works to capture the very unlikely, fragile normalcy that this non-state actor managed to put in place. They aimed for a participatory democracy where women and men govern together. Women are co-heads of every town they govern. A women’s council was created in every town these fighters took back. It is the most far-reaching experiment in women’s equality, in the least likely place in the world—right on the ashes of the ISIS fight.

You’ve said this is a story that’s right for this moment.

Since 2018 we’ve heard more conversation than ever before about who writes the rules that govern our lives. My aunt, who is Mexican and a survivor of domestic violence, always says, “Never import other people’s limitations.” This book is about women who said the same thing, essentially: “We are going to press forward and be the unlikeliest force in the world to stop the men of the Islamic State.” I wanted to take readers into that world of swashbuckling, chain-smoking leaders on one side, and much quieter, more introverted individuals on the other, and show the events that led very normal people into extraordinary circumstances.

In your descriptions of women commanding men, there isn’t any friction or resentment. Was that really the case?

The battlefield is a great leveler. It’s all about staying alive. Who is going to help me achieve my mission? The same was true in Ashley’s War. Daughters captures the moment when a female commander took us to meet the men in her unit, and my jaw was on the ground, but everyone else thought it was completely normal. I want readers to toggle back and forth between the feeling that this is extraordinary and also, well, we’re all just getting through this.

The second piece is that the ideology set forth by their leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has women’s equality at its center. So they’re all singing from the same book in that sense. And, finally, what really struck me is the women don’t care. They’re not at all apologetic about exercising power or running things. They don’t care if men feel good about it or they don’t. That’s what is different.

Are there any lessons here for other militaries?

It goes much broader than the military. The US Special Operations folks who are part of this story had a deep and abiding respect for these women. Does it have lessons for our society is the question, I think. Women not being apologetic about saying, “We don’t have to beg for a little bit here and a little bit there. We are half the population. We’re going to take our rightful place in society.”

I’m guessing you keep in touch with the protagonists of Daughters. How are things going now?

COVID-19 has obviously created a challenge for going back to visit but, yes, I do stay in touch with the women who are featured in the book. What really strikes me is how enduring the governmental institutions they helped create have been. Raqqa, for example, still has a women’s council, and women co-lead every civil council (the governing body of each town), even though in theory the Syrian regime and the Russians are in the arena also. It speaks to what they’ve worked to put in place. It’s not that it’s perfect; it’s evolving, and these women continue to work to provide security and to work for what they believe in. The big question that the book ends on is what comes next, and the Biden administration obviously will be part of deciding that. The naming of Brett McGurk to the government, as well as others who are part of this story, has given people some hope, I think. They have never given up, and I do hope that people take inspiration from this book: Women led, and they created role models for the next generation by fighting with humanity against inhumanity.

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