Angry Planet - How 'The Daughters of Kobani' Defeated ISIS

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

When Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, finally fell in late 2017, America wasn’t really paying close attention. We’d had nearly a year of turmoil here at home, and, in many ways, Islamic State was old news.And if we weren’t paying that much attention to the fight, we paid even less attention to the fighters. So, today we’ll tell the story of the Kurdish men and women who led the Syrian Democratic Forces.To take us through it, we have Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who’s just published Daughters of Kobani, which tells the story of the Kurdish fight against Islamic State. Lemmon is a journalist and best-selling author who last appeared on the show to talk about her book Ashley’s War. Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Oh, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. When Islamic State's capital, Raka, fell in late 2017, America wasn't really paying close attention. We'd had nearly a year of turmoil here at home, and in many ways, Islamic State was old news. And if we weren't paying that much attention to the fight,

we paid even less attention to the fighters. So today we'll make up for it and we'll tell the story of the Kurdish men and women who led the Syrian Democratic forces. To take us through it, we have Gail Tsemec Lemon, who just published Daughters of Kabani, which tells the story of the Kurdish fight against Islamic State. Lemon is a journalist and best-selling author who last appeared on the show to talk about her book Ashley's War. We'll link to that show in the newsletter. Thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here.

I hope you don't mind if we start with the real basics, but who exactly are the Kurds, and especially in relation to Abdullah Ocelon. He just seems like such an important figure from the book. Absolutely, but I'm delighted to be here. So the Kurds are the largest stateless population, the largest ethnic group with no state. And they are stateless in the sense that there are Kurds spread

among four nations, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. In many ways, the least known group of Kurds were in Syria, the smallest of the four, and also probably the least visible in terms of the conversation that had gone on for many years. I think many in the U.S. if they knew of the Kurdish community would know a lot about Kurds in Iraq. And to me, what was so fascinating about this was that the folks who ended up becoming America's partner on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State were people who took up arms initially to keep other people out, really to protect their own rights for self-rule for the first time in Syria, people who had lived under the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and who had really not enjoyed basic rights

that as citizens we take for granted, the right to teach in your language, the right to name your children, what you wish, the right to move around freely, the right to celebrate your holidays, unimpeded, the right to publish in your language. And so all of these things, the notion initially, when these folks took up arms, was to keep other people out and to govern themselves. And among the Kurds in Syria, this group of people, women and men, who followed Abdullah Ochoa were the most organized among the Kurdish community in Syria. So you had the most organized of this this stateless group who said, we are going to be the ones when the vacuum of the Syrian Civil War occurs, who step in and provide some basic services and some basic law and order. And it became

that basic law and order and basic services that catapulted them onto the global stage when the U.S. is hunting for a partner who's going to be willing to take on the Islamic State and not topple Bashar al-Assad because the Obama administration really had no appetite for regime. change at that time. I think, though, to just understand the Kurds a little bit when I started off reading the book, you're talking about families that seem very traditional for the region in that men are in charge of the households. You have one of the main characters who is basically denied at every turn, everything that she wants to do. She doesn't get to marry who she wants. She doesn't get to continue her schooling. And that's a long way from being able to pick up

a rifle, an assault rifle, and go to the front line. And that's one of the reasons I was asking you about Ochoon is just, there's a very interesting philosophy that made for a very quick change. Is that right? So Abdullah Oshlan is this leader who is sitting in Turkish prison, who is writing and publishing. And this group of Syrian Kurds really follows his writings and his work and his teachings. And his notion is that the Kurds cannot be free until women are free. So that women's rights, women's equality, women's emancipation does not sit at the periphery of anything. And that's why it looks so different when you see it on the ground is that for those of us who've had the privilege of seeing a lot of different women's movements in different places, the thing that

is striking about this is that it's right at the heart of the political experiment and the military effort. Not because everybody is sitting around singing kumbaya and everything is grand, but because they're following this ideology, which has the notion that this people cannot achieve its full potential without women achieving their full potential at the core of everything it does. And I wanted readers to really come and understand the humanity. We talk about war as if it is faceless and nameless and it is not. And I really wanted readers to spend time with Nareen, who you talk about, right, this young woman who couldn't go to university because her uncle said, listen, we've already decided women in our family don't need to do this. You don't need to go. Couldn't marry the person

she loved because her uncle said, I've already picked out a spouse for you. I've already picked out a husband for you. And she says, no. So by the time folks who come from the Ocelon wing of politics, knock on her door and say, we have this notion of women's emancipation in this politics, of course she says yes. And we follow her all the way from that journey to, becoming the kind of junior aid for the head of the women's protection units all the way to liberating her hometown from the Islamic State and watching girls come up to her and say, I want to be like you? It really is remarkable. It's remarkable in a couple of different ways. One, though, is that she doesn't come across in the story purely as a woman. She comes across

as a soldier. I think that's one of the things that's actually very interesting about all the characters. Zima comes across as one of, this is another woman who is central to the fight for Kobani itself. She comes across as maybe the bravest person I've ever read about. I don't know if that's overstating the case, but it's really, she's a remarkable story. And a remarkable person. Yeah, she is. So it was really funny. Right before the book came out, you do so much work and prep and you have scholars that really help you out and read and send early notes. Folks in the field were sent early notes. And I was at dinner, a couple weeks before it came out. And I get this note from someone who was reading and saying, I have a problem. I was like, oh my God, you know, I jump up from the table. Did I get something

inaccurately? I need to fix that right away. So he said, I think I have a crush on a Zima. And I said, you don't write, don't text me that. You know, I was so worried. It was something substance to. But it was really funny because I think people have fallen in love with the the four characters and the way that you do with people you meet via stories. And that just means everything to me because we have so otherized those who fight these wars. And there is no other. In the end, it really is just us. And it is stories that remove the distance between us. So Zima is just this, you know, kind of swashbuckling. I laugh every time I talk about her because I just think of all the hours I spend and she always made me laugh because she's so monumentally

herself. She is swashbuckling, chain smoking, large and like very rye, former high school volleyball star, who is just somebody who always had deep confidence in herself and was, for those of you who love little women, then Joe March and then some character of this story. She had really always believed that Kobani would not fall. And that was at a time when ISIS had never been defeated on the battlefield. And there was absolutely no reason to think that this, as I saw these, as one scholar told me, and as one, somebody on the ground agreed, sort of country bumpkins, who are not going to be the people who are going to give them their first loss. But you had people like this Emma who would say, we will never seed an itch to these monsters and never. And I will die

before I will let them take our town. And I really wanted people to get to know her. Well, and she really did. She nearly died. Actually, once in this book. I was wondering if, because you do have a lot of experience covering war, was her courage something that really struck you as remarkable for a soldier? Or is that something you've seen in a lot? I see it all the time. I think what was remarkable about her, and I wrote this about the book. And it's really, I really want readers to spend time thinking about this. When they read it is that never have I seen women more confident in being in power and less apologetic about running things. And that is what you know is when you spend time with

Azima. She really, she's going to bring you a lobby. You don't want to come. Don't because she is. You're like, she is going to do her thing no matter what. And there is this female superpower of just getting on with it that she really exemplifies. So I don't think her courage is unique. I think I've met incredible people. I think it's extraordinary. But I don't think it's unique. And I really wanted us to question the whole notion of how we see women in these stories. because when women do things that are groundbreaking and remarkable, they are seen as exceptions. And when men do things that are groundbreaking and remarkable, they are seen as leaders. And I wanted the book to really push readers to confront like, how do I think about what a leader

looks like, what a warrior looks like? But also, she's just enormous fun. If you were in a dinner party, that's the person you would want to be next to you because she really has this gift of looking life in the face and seeing the absurdity, seeing the humor, seeing the wit, understanding the stakes, and keeping her humanity. So go back just a little bit to talk about how, in a way, it's almost that she got her chance. First, just a tiny detail, and I've actually been wondering this forever, and it's not the easiest thing to find out for some reason. Kurds are differentiated from Sunni Muslims, but are they Sunni? They are Muslim. that great? So most they most are. That is correct. Okay. And again, so how did the YPJ get started and how? We talked a little bit about it and his philosophy. But how did it actually get started and how did

people get trained? The women's protection units were founded in 2013. The people's protection units already had been founded at that time, which were the Syrian Kurdish groups that were basically that people came together in neighborhood saying, we're going to organize ourselves. We're going to keep the regime out. We're going to keep extremists out. Anybody who else, we're going to organize and take care of our own majority Kurdish. That was the extent. The women's protection units were founded after that because already by 2013 women had been fighting Nusra, had been fighting al-Qaeda-linked groups, and Roshda, who is the opposite of Azima, her dearest friend, who is the introverted, Kind of the Sun and Moon introvert.

It would rather read a book. Very quiet, very funny in her own, very much more kind of serene. You'd have to really push her to get a reaction from her, whereas Azima would give it immediately, love Diego Maradona deeply. So she thought she was going to be a pharmacist. She ends up becoming Roja, becomes the Americans interlocutor in the fight to retake Raka from the Islamic State, the capital, from which they've been planning attacks against any number of places.

Anyway, Rocha said, when I said, why did you file the women's protection units when you already had this ideology that said you were equal? And you already were fighting alongside men from your community at that point against al-Qaeda and groups and others and the predecessors to the Islamic State. And she said, you couldn't let stand a world in which men would buy and sell women. And we just didn't want men taking credit for our work. And at that, I just broke out laughing because the truth was that there was that there is no. nobody anywhere in the world who had been born or identified female, who didn't understand that notion. And here we were in this corner or sliver of northeastern Syria, recognized outside its borders by absolutely nobody, talking about something that could not be more universal to the

experience of being born or identifying at a girl. And it made me laugh sorry. And Roja said, why are you laughing? I said, because that's the book, right? That's the book right there. It doesn't matter the context. It's the shared humanity of these women who are taking on the world's extremists who are like, no, we just don't want men saying we did this ourselves. But the units actually, it's not that they operated separately in all cases. You had men leading women and women, more to the point, leading men throughout the campaign. Across ethnic groups, too. That actually was another question. The opening of the book is Clara and I going to the frontline and Clara taking one of the women's protection units commanders who takes us to see her forces and

there are men from the Arab community who are all talking to her about their day and what it was like to fight ISIS that day. That's one of the things that I really found remarkable and I wanted to ask you about a little bit. And it's hard not to jump around a little bit because the story has themes that are outside of time. And I was wondering, all right, you have the protection units, you have men, women, and then eventually the United States convinces, which is really interesting to me, they basically convince the Kurds to really do the United States fighting on the ground, even outside of their own areas, which is a pretty amazing sales job to me. But that brought together something that then became known as the Syrian Democratic forces.

And that, so how big a part were Arab? in that because it was supposed to be beyond just Kurds. And yeah, how did men and women, you know, interact when you brought in a large number of Arabs who I assumed there weren't a lot of Arab women fighting? So a couple of things on that. All you have a tremendous assortment of really important questions. No, it's great. And the book really does get the first time into how did the SDF come to be.

So the Syrian Democratic forces are basically the people's protection units. plus the women's protection units, then expanding well beyond that to include folks from across ethnic communities and across religious communities, especially, of course, folks in the Arab community. It's deeply important. And the Kurds say there's no way for us to take Raqa and other places as a Kurdish force. It will not work. And it is completely ill-advised. And there were a lot of Arab forces who had been fighting ISIS and who had certainly had been taking on the regime. And so, there were groups that allied with the people's protection units that came under the banner of the SDF. We met them in the summer of 2017 when I was there for PBS NewsHour. And then I

continued to meet them. And what was striking was the reality, which I learned deeply from Ashley's War, the second book I wrote, is that the battlefield is a great level of. So maybe it was new for these forces, Kurdish and our to be fighting alongside women and with women. But if they had a commander who cared about them, who led from the front, who always made sure they had what they needed and did everything they could to make sure they had what they needed and they got home safely and who cared when something went wrong and who took responsibility when something went wrong, that was what meant. And Roja had a story about some of the men from the Arab community bringing their daughters to meet her, some of whom then eventually joined women's protection

units. And on the question about Arab women, I spent probably one of the most unforgettable two days of interviews I've ever done were a young woman from Raqa who lived under the Islamic State from the Arab community who then later joined the women's protection units. And there's one story in the book that I just, I think about this young woman every day. She is, you want to talk about courageous. Yes, Azim is courageous. But this young woman with her moral courage and her fortitude, you know, her brother is from Raqa, a brother joins the Islamic State, forces her to marry an ISIS fighter. She goes to her mother, says, I don't want to do this. She has no choice. Their mother sends her back. Her brother sends her back. Tries to divorce, get sent back. Ends up being truly

brutalized in Idlib by for basically not falling in line with what was expected of her. Makes her way back to SDF territory after Raqa has fallen finally. The Islamic State has been pushed out after brutal fight and joins the women's protection unions. And I looked at her in the middle of the interview and I said, how are you here? How do you have the courage? Because honestly, if 98% of us went through this, we would be corralled up in a ball watching television and never leaving the house again for the rest of our days. And she looked at me with deep clarity and said, why should men have the right to do this? As if her very existence, and I really wanted readers to capture the moment because we're sitting in this room and the only sound is Roja, who knows this story well,

has been working with this young woman for years, is the sound. of her sunflower seeds hitting the metal bowl beneath. And the strength and the fortitude that this young woman embodied, I think really inspired me and made me think about how do I share her courage with all of you? Here's a young woman who said, this should not stand and my life will be a reminder, not of everything I endured, the inhumanity I adore, but of the ability to endure and overcome and to live as a reminder that I will not be erased. And there is an element of revenge as well. A hundred percent.

It's funny. So Max Brooks, who wrote World War Z, his wife, Michelle, is a good friend. And she said, you know, sometimes we'd like to think we're above revenge, but we're not. And I said, no one's above revenge. This is as old as the written word. Zima, you talk to her, talk to Roja. Of course they wanted revenge. They were watching these men.

And you go into battle in the daughters of Kobani with them. And he watched ISIS, you know, already hurt their friends and then behead them for just because they could. And of course they wanted revenge. They wanted a world in which men who bought and sold women were stopped. And when Aziva, who gets grazed by a bullet in the battle for Kobani, gets shot by an ISIS fighter in the battle of Kobani. The bullet's still in her heart. She gets out a bet in the makeshift hospital, the school turned into a hospital in Kobani and goes to the press conference. And January of 2015 to say, women were part of handing you this defeat, Islamic State.

And we want the world to know that. She also was very intent, Azima, that is, in taking out the person who shot. Yes, that was, it was very funny. We're in the interview. And she said, the only thing that made me feel better was that he hopped off the battlefield too. She was very serious about that. Because this guy who she still thinks was potentially Chechen, that sort of becomes an Afghanistan, Chechen was always a catch-all name for foreigners, foreign fighters.

Not from me, but from folks on the ground. She said, maybe he was touching, who knows, this guy who shot her, he had really come for her. And when after she realizes she's shot and she can't see, she doesn't realize until she goes to look and realizes she can't see through the eye that she usually uses to take a shot, that he has got her. And immediately, she says, I just wanted to take him out. All right, angry planet listeners. We are going to pause there for a break.

We will be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, let's get back into it. And she gets him enough that she hits him in the left. And the type of fighting that's going on when this is happening, it's street by street. And that's actually common throughout. Those were the battles that they were fighting. This is house by house, the Islamic state booby-trapping every step of the way as they withdrew. How did people learn to fight like that?

How did they learn the tactics? Was it just a matter of learning? on the ground? So this becomes the policy tightrope that the Americans are watching, walking the entire time, right? Because the people's protection units are an offshoot of the PKK, right, in Turkey. And there was, there were people who had come from, Condo and come down from the mountains that were Syrian, who admitted that they could, right? People who also had been imprisoned by Assad, had been tortured by the Assad regime. And they come back and they really, and really come start training people from their community.

And so they get basic training. But as Roja and Zemem would say, there weren't even enough weapons to go around when they start doing training. And this is also well before ISIS. So all of this is happening. They get better and better at time and truly experience is the teacher.

They learn urban combat from the Islamic State. And John Spencer from West Point, and I've talked about this, probably a decent amount, that kind of room by room, house by house. Rocha at one point puts her, AK through a wall and brushes up against the let of an Islamic State fighter. That's how close they are to the people who are trying to kill them and the people who've come to their territory.

That actually, you mentioned West Point. That makes me think about the United States involvement. How involved was the United States in this fight? And there were airstrikes. What else? They provide material aid or? And we watch, really, the daughters of Kobani takes you into the progression of American involvement. So at the beginning, it's this looking for Goldilocks force, right?

A force is willing to take on ISIS and hold terrain, advance without toppling Assad. And a force that has the will to take on and defeat ISIS at a time when ISIS looks glittering and unstoppable. It's hard to remember. That's what 2014 was. As the Americans start working with them, and I spent a lot of time with folks from the U.S. side who were very much a part of this, who even come in the U.S. and sleeping at their basis so that on the times when they can get all the conditions met for an airstrike, that there is no delay from the U.S. side because they feel so strongly that this fighting force has the will and the heart to beat ISIS and they feel like

they must do everything they can to the point that their spouses are bringing Chick-fil-A to the bases to help and support. So this is, the U.S. goes from watching to all, offering airstrikes to then, and we really go into this whole Washington policy conversation, to, okay, we can do anirdrop, which is deeply controversial because NATO-Alli Turkey is very much against this. They do a weapons drop in weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, basic stuff during Kobani. After Kobani, they say maybe this is the foundation for going on from here. Maybe this is the ground force that's going to take us all the way to rock up and stop the Islamic State from even holding that piece of terrain. And so then there becomes the advise and

assist effort, 50 U.S. forces on the ground and those who support them. And that's when the special operations community gets much more deeply involved. And we go into the first special operations visit on the ground when they go looking for a military base. And then a young woman comes up to this very gruesled special operations veteran is, hey, I bet I'd kill more ISIS than you. And he said, you know, I looked there. I was like, God, she probably did. Because these. young women had been fighting, to your point, room by room and house by house, the men who wanted their territory. Did things change at all between administrations in the United States? Far less than you would expect did things change between administrations because, in part,

because many of the same people were involved, including Brett McGirk, and including folks who had been there right from the start on the Joint Chief side, on the military side, and also on the diplomatic side. So the Obama administration would go inside. This is the book. It wants to arm the Syrian Kurds directly, finally, two years into its partnership by the time it's about to take the town of Raqa. And there's a real debate. Should we do this or not right before the Trump administration comes because they're going to have a huge diplomatic challenge with NATO ally Turkey if we do this. And on the other hand, they're going to be delayed if we don't. And in the end, the Trump administration quite understandably wants to do its own review and comes out with the same

conclusion. Tony Blinken, then not Secretary Blinken, puts an op-ed in the New York Times as they're leaving saying, if you want to take Rucca, here's the group you work with. And go back and pull that up. But that happened several months later, right before they really do start in earnest. So the policy actually doesn't change dramatically, except the number of U.S. forces is not so close to monitored. But it's more or less, much more continuity than a change of administration might lead you to believe. And to go, the withdrawal conversation starts. And both administrations, as you just mentioned, are dealing with Turkey. And, yeah, so NATO ally really can't stand the Kurds.

And when you're talking about Erdogan in particular, I mean, he is taken, let's just say, a very strong stance against the Kurds. How did the United States walk this fine line? Did they feel it was necessary? Was there one side that was more important than the other? Was getting rid of Islamic State more important than keeping Turkey on side? So interesting. There's a moment in the book where I'm with Fausa Yusuf, one of the political leaders. Because the book is really, as much as it's about women leading the military fight, for these women, for this community, it was about the politics.

The as Nauru is the head of the Women's Protection Unit said, if we could lead in war, war we could govern in peace. You look at the founding document in this sliver of northeastern Syria, right? Women are mentioned 13 times. Yes to girls' education. No to child marriage. Yes to women's full participation politically. Yes to women's economic participation. Every town they took from ISIS had a male and a female co-head of the civil council. Every town had a women's council. It goes much farther than anything we've seen even in the United States. So the political piece was at the heart. And this group of Syrian Kurds was always very well aware that if it were between a group of Syrian Kurds who fought alongside them and NATO ally Turkey, which could also go to Russia, they always understood who the U.S. would choose. But they also understood that they were having a constant dialogue with the United States, right, that the United States said, we need you to keep going.

It's not going to be about Geneva. It's going to be about who holds terrain when it comes to deciding the future of Syria. And the United States truly catapulted these people onto the global stage because these folks had the will to fight and the tenacity and the courage to keep going not just for their sake, but truly for the worlds, right? For the U.S., for Europe, for the region. So for Washington, there was this policy conundrum, which was we need NATO ally Turkey on side, right? We don't want them in the arms of the Russians. on the other hand, the most effective fighting force against ISIS and folks who really share many of our values are this group. And the beautiful memo at the end of the book comes from Ambassador William Robo, who really writes so eloquently and powerfully the summation of this, which is we put the bull's eye inadvertently on the back of this group of Syrian Kurds.

because by working with the U.S., they raised, we raised their profile, we made them, you know, Turkey seen them as even more of a threat. And Turkey was negotiating with these folks as recently as 2015. It was really the moment of working with the United States and coming into that kind of international spotlight that amped up the entire conversation that made it all far more black and white and existential in the view of Turkey. And the U.S. said, look, we can show you. No attacks on Turkish all been launched from Syria. This group has been fighting ISIS as America's partner. And we watch as really no good answer is ever found by the Americans to deal with Turkey on this issue. And this continues until this day. That's actually exactly what I was thinking about, because not to get too far into

any of this, but the Syrian Kurds are not the first group of Kurds who thought they had the U.S. backing, only to find out that when push came to shove, the United States wasn't actually there for them. It happened more than once, actually, in Iraq. And what do you think, what is the current state? And do you think the United States feels indebted in any way to the Kurds at this point? The most important point is this is about America's national security. It really is about the people who are continuing every single day to both keep the pressure on the Islamic State, even now as you and I speak, and who are holding 2,000 foreign fighters who fought with ISIS, who no one else will take back. Their own home countries will not take back. Plus, more than 13,000 women and children from third party countries,

also citizens that will not take them back. And they're holding on this. The same people who fought ISIS now are dealing with nearly solo. I just wrote a piece. about this for defense one, the aftermath of the Islamic State. And the international community would like to put its hands over its ears and wait for this to go away and it will not, period. So this is part of what, this is a fighting force that lost 10,000 people fighting ISIS for the world. Every gold star family is a tragedy. You and I talked about this. We were talking about Ashley's war. But you must remember also. that the U.S. lost fewer than 10 forces, 10 fight forces in the fight to retake ISIS territory

in Syria because these folks put their young people on the line. So that, I think, is the stakes. The question is what comes next? And it really will be up to the Biden administration. There's no question that their outlook and their decisions, they are walking this tightro. Brett McGurk once more, Secretary of Blinken once more. These are all people who are deeply familiar with the problem set. And they are really looking to see this even as the U.S. would really like nothing more than to end the chapter of the post-9-11 conflicts that will not be ended. They are not going away. What the U.S. chooses to do remains under U.S. control. But whether these fights end is not a choice that America is going to make.

No, that's a fantastic point, I think. Just that now Biden is dealing with the maybe the end of the Afghan war from the U.S. point of view, I think it's just, but it's key to think that if we declare these wars over, they're not over for the people who are on the ground at all. The last U.S. troops may eventually leave Afghanistan. The U.S. may decide to just take Turkey side or hands off when whatever happens next for the Kurds, or they maybe will decide to defend their rights. But whatever happens, it's still going to be plenty of people who actually live in these countries that have to deal with it. I actually just wrote a piece about Canada Biden was very eloquent about the need for diplomacy. And I deeply believe that their U.S. diplomacy can make a significant difference here.

I think it can address Turkey's concerns. I think the U.S. can use diplomatic muscle to both help and work with the partner in the ISIS fight and assuage some of the concern that NATO ally Turkey may. have. And this is something that in Iowa in 2019, then candidate Biden talked about extensively. And so I think this is something that we need to actually push for. And it's been amazing, honestly, to see that book clubs and folks who never contended with these stories. And so many readers have written me and said, how did I not know Azima and Rocha and no ruse? And I said, you know, very little has broken through between 2016 and 2020 that was overseas, first of all. Secondly, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,

they all get put together in this one manila envelope labeled failure. When actually, it's inaccurate and it's also deeply disrespectful to the people who have put their lives on the line in those countries. And what I wanted to do was to say there are stakes here. There are people who are fighting every single day for values you will recognize. eyes. And that is what has been so moving is to have people say, how can I say, how can I speak up for this people? How can I get involved? And, you know, I always say, I'm not an advocate, but I will tell you one thing. No one thinks you care. If you do care, let the people who represent you know that.

And that has really opened up some amazing conversations because I deeply believe that change does not come from Washington. Change comes from people outside who push Washington to move off the status quote. Gail Tsemec Lemon, thank you very much for coming on the show. And the book is Daughters of Kobani. And I really, I recommend it very highly. Great to join you. Thank you for having me. That's all for this week. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please check out our substack at Angry PlanetPod.com, where for just $9 a month, you get commercial free episodes, like the one you're hearing now, and bonus episodes twice a month. Again, that's at angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com.

We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict from an angry planet.