What the Kurds Want: Syrian Kurds are trying to build a leftist revolution in the midst of a civil war. Is it a new Middle East, or just another fracture?

A member of Kurdish Syria’s YPJ unit, an all-female branch of the region’s military forces. (erin trieb)

Growing up in the 1980s in Syria, Hediye Yusif was a good student. But it didn’t take her long to realize that she would have to drop out of school if she wanted to learn anything meaningful. The things that seemed important to her—Karl Marx, Palestinian resistance, feminism, Kurdish history—were not part of the curriculum at her Damascus boarding school. And back home in Derik, a city in Kurdish Syria, women were generally discouraged from becoming educated. It wasn’t until she discovered the illegal, underground classes organized by Damascus’s Kurdish dissidents that she began to lay the intellectual groundwork for a life that would include activism, prison, and, now, being at the helm of what she hopes will be a Kurdish revolution. “I lived in a paradox,” she said of her youth, “between thinking about my own personal life and my private desires and the life of my nation and women and the Kurdish people in general.” So, at fourteen, Yusif chose a life—“in the end,” she says, “I decided to work for my people.” Then she waited for the moment when that life would mean something.

That moment came in 2012, when Yusif was released from prison—she had served less than a year of a three-year sentence for “being a member of a secret organization trying to divide Syria”—and entered a fledgling Kurdish political scene. By then, the protests against President Bashar al-Assad had escalated into an uprising that was quickly devolving into a full-blown civil war. The collapse of the Syrian state presented an opportunity for Kurds, and, in the political vacuum, with Assad concentrating his forces in other parts of the country, they declared autonomy in Syria’s three Kurdish-dominated cantons—Jazira, Afrin, and Kobani—known collectively as Rojava.

Yusif, a small but imposing woman with thick black hair and an unshakable gaze, had spent the early stages of the uprising enduring the hardships of Assad’s prisons, including solitary confinement, starvation, and physical abuse. At first, the misery of prison overwhelmed her. She obsessed over the injustices Kurds faced in Syria, and thought a lot, she says, about what might drive a Palestinian woman to become a suicide bomber. To a degree, she understood the urge.

In 2011, word of the uprisings reached the prison, giving Yusif new energy and a sense of purpose. She began to organize the detainees in order to protest conditions at the prison and demand their rights as political prisoners. She led a hunger strike that included male prisoners, and as a result she and her fellow female detainees were sequestered in a separate facility. “With us, with the women, they had a policy of total isolation,” Yusif says. By the time she was released in 2012, she had become a powerhouse of conviction—a staunch anticapitalist and defender of women, well-known for her sacrifices for the Kurdish cause. This reputation, along with her connection to the community of Syrian-Kurdish activists who were then rising to prominence, led to her election as copresident of Jazira, the largest of Rojava’s three cantons.

Yusif and I met in April 2015 at her office, an orderly room trimmed with paraphernalia and tucked into a villa that had once belonged to the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company. The villa itself was part of a large residential compound, known as Rumelan, which once housed most of the oil company’s 3,000 workers. Until 2012, Rumelan was cut off from the Kurds who lived around it by a high wall and barbed wire. Assad’s oil company exploited nearby oil fields of the same name, with profits going to members of his ruling Baath party. Now, the compound serves as the Jazira headquarters of the...