Kurdish women

The death of the Kurdish woman Jina Amini in September 2022 sparked an inferno of protests throughout Iran, under the banner of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi.” This Kurdish language slogan, which translates to “Women, Life, Freedom,” soon showed up on banners carried throughout the cities of Eastern Kurdistan (northwest Iran), and quickly became the official slogan […]

“Resistance. Archiving, documenting, remembering, and referencing is an integral part of our continuing fight merely to exist as Kurds. To preserve is to accept, and in the absence of our own national archive, what we are doing at Jiyan is minuscule in comparison to what could be achieved if we as a collective society placed as much […]

Vian Hussein is a rising Kurdish artist from Rojava, living in the UK. Her powerfully emotive pieces breach the boundaries between art and activism and moves us boldly across the emotional terrain of identity, gender, and belonging. Vian is a child of the Syrian Civil War, the offspring of displacement and asylum, of long treacherous […]

Background In 2014, I took part in a pilot initiative aimed at gathering stories from Kurdish women. The project “Many Women, Many Words” sought to uncover the untold stories of women in Kurdistan during the period of Saddam Hussein’s rule and the Kurdish resistance. Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region within Iraq, experienced a deliberate genocide orchestrated […]

Kurdistan remains a widely occupied and terrorized terrain. For decades various forms of colonial and imperial violence has been imposed on the Kurds, ranging from ethnic cleansing, genocides, chemical weapons, mass execution of fighting-aged males, bombardments, systemic environmental destruction including widespread destruction of thousands of villages, forced migration and violent assimilation policies and more. The […]

In January 2018, Turkey’s military launched an unprovoked cross border operation against the Afrin (Efrîn) region of Rojava in northwest Syria. The military invasion was cynically named “Operation Olive Branch” (an Orwellian reference to somehow offering peace through war), which went on to cause massive infrastructural damage and civilian suffering to those in the city […]

With a women’s-led revolution brewing in neighboring Iran and the Kurdish women’s slogan of “Women, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi) being shouted in Parliaments around the globe, the focus on women’s rights and equality in the Middle East has never been more prescient. In light of this, Dr. Shilan Fuad Hussain – a Marie Curie […]