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As for the difficulties alleged by Gutman in reporting on those affected by the fighting on the approach to Raqqa, Times journalist Anthony Lloyd reports no such difficulties and paints a rather different pictures of the response of Arab villagers to the SDF: Few of the women waste any time hurling away their dark clothes as soon they reach the first positions of the SDF, the American-backed units now approaching Raqqa from three sides. “The niqab came to symbolise the suffocating feeling we had of life under the Daesh,” Um Lamis, 33, a mother from Raqqa, said as she sat in the shade of a tree discussing her flight across the lines two days earlier. “The veil removed me from my sense of engagement with the outside world. It is something Raqqa women grew to hate more than anything else. So I ripped it off as soon as I reached the SDF frontline.” She ululated with delight. “It was like breathing again!” The accounts of the Raqqa women escaping one of the most stifling environments on Earth illuminate a system whereby Islamic State not only repressed women but delighted in the cruelty of its repression. “I was forced to watch more beheadings than I care to remember,” Um Lamis said, cradling her three-year-old daughter. “You don’t ever expect — not as a man nor woman — to see anything like that. Yet we were repeatedly forced to watch it.” She described seeing one man, accused of collaboration with the coalition, crucified. “I was ordered out of the back of my husband’s car to watch the man tied to a cross. He was begging for forgiveness but an emir stabbed a knife into his chest and then shot him in the head. He was left on the cross for three days as an example. The image was burned into my brain. I thought I would never sleep again.” Um Ali, 60, who had fled across the frontline a week before, was forced to watch her son beat her daughter in a village south of Raqqa. The incident began when a patrol of Islamic State religious police, Hisbah, noticed the daughter had taken off her niqab. They rounded up the family, ensured the daughter was wearing the niqab and marched them to their headquarters in the village. “First they beat my 20-year-old son with 70 lashes across his back with a cane as punishment for allowing his sister to sin,” said Um Ali. “Then they sat my daughter in a chair, a guard either side, and ordered my son to beat her outstretched hands with the same cane used to beat him.” At first, she said, her son, his own back thick with weals, tried to avoid hurting his sister. “So the Hisbah told him, ‘Beat her strongly or we will punish you again.’ He gave her 50 strikes. My daughter flinched with every blow. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not as the niqab covered her face.” The codes Raqqa women had to abide by under Islamic State rule were similar to those of the Afghan Taliban. No woman could go out unaccompanied. The chaperone had to be a direct male family member — father, brother, son. Even sunlight was restricted, as windows were ordered shrouded so that passers-by could not see women inside their houses. Clothing transgressions were punished with 15-day re-education courses or beatings, depending on the scale of the offence and whim of the Hisbah, the local government. The women regarded the female branch of Hisbah, the al-Khansaa brigade, with particular fear. Their numbers included wives of foreign fighters, radicalised local women, and impoverished recruits who joined because they had little choice. “They were cruel, and stole from our homes during searches,” Um Lamis said. “And they seemed to enjoy issuing beatings.” Yet there was a realistic acceptance of Islamic State widows who had escaped among them. Um Lamis said many had no choice in their husband’s decisions, or that their dead husbands joined ISIS as an alternative to poverty. Compounding the shock of their flight from Raqqa and sudden freedom, many women said the first fighters they had seen across no man’s land had been Kurdish women from the YPJ, the all-female units fighting as part of the SDF. “One minute I lived in Raqqa, a city ruled by men,” said Um Lamis, “where women had not even the power to show our faces. The next I am greeted by armed Kurdish women, faces bare and their hair uncovered, guns in hands, fighting the Daesh. “They welcomed me as a sister! I bow to their courage!” Contact with the YPJ cadres, each versed in the rights of women as a central part of their own ideology, has left an indelible impression on many Raqqa women. The emerging system of local governance is remarkable for its difference, too. Typically, the Rojava territory is governed by local assemblies and communes, all chaired by women. “At first some of the men in my village had a problem when I was elected co-chairwoman to my local assembly,” said Amina al-Hassan, 30, a Sunni Arab woman, who had lived for three years under Islamic State rule until her village was liberated by the SDF. “They said it wasn’t my place as a woman,” she said. “So I said to them, to their faces: ‘You didn’t dare say a word when the Daesh were in charge. Now they have gone you want to deprive women again of their rights?’ The men hung their heads.” Whatever the future of Raqqa’s women, and however male-dominated the society to which they return after the defeat of Islamic State in Raqqa, each woman I spoke to from the city said the experience of life there, and their escape into a more egalitarian society, had irreversibly altered their perceptions. “Under the rule of Daesh our husbands and sons lost their rights too — they were afraid and unable to protect us,” said Um Lamis. “So now our men must realise that when all this is over and the Daesh are defeated things will not be as they were before: women have not gone through so much at the hands of men to remain disadvantaged in the future. It will never be as before.” http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/niqabs-thrown-down-in-the-sand-as-women-flee-raqqa/news-story/04173c9a8acc056b27d02daf90e369bd On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 11:20 AM, Nick Fredman <nick.j.fred...@gmail.com> wrote: > Gutman's unreliable hackery isn't just indicated by the Turkish state's > sponsorship of him, and his breezy use of the term "ethnic cleansing" and > general distortion of the recent UN report that Chris mentions. After his > Nation smear jobs earlier this year, two of his sources complained that he > distorted their views. He also ludicrously distorted the battles of Shinjar > and Kobane to paint the PKK-led current as collaborators with ISIS bent on > regional domination at the expense of the innocent defenseless parties > Turkey and the KRG. See http://exiledonline.com/ > the-war-nerd-a-response-to-neocon-hit-man-roy-gutman/ (not that I agree > with everything this guy says on Syria but he dies nail Gutman's > distortion) and my article http://links.org.au/fake-news-rojava-revolution > > On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 at 10:35 am, Chris Slee via Marxism < > marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > >> ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** >> #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. >> #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. >> #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. >> ***************************************************************** >> >> Roy Gutman was in northern Syria as a guest of the Turkish government. >> > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
