Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice. (New York: Penguin Press, 2021). Nonfiction.

Discussed at our Book Club on November 1, 2022, World Kobane Day

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (1973- ) is an author who writes on the role of women and girls in foreign policy. Initially an ABC journalist, she earned an MBA from Harvard, for which she traveled to Rwanda and Afghanistan to study women’s entrepreneurship. She became a best-selling author with The Dressmaker of Khain Khana (2011), Ashley’s War (2015), and now Daughters of Kobani. She serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Women and Foreign Policy Program with the Council on Foreign Relations

Daughters of Kobani is the story of several women fighters during the war against ISIS, a radical Sharia dystopia that brutalizes women with extreme savagery. It describes how the women’s militia, the YPJ ,came into existence and the nature of their struggle. It tells the story of several specific YPJ warriors, going back to their life circumstances in North East Syria and what led them to join the militia. It recounts their actions in the battle to liberate cities from ISIS, even the minutiae of house to house fighting. 

The fighting is dangerous, and the women face booby-traps and car bombs. ISIS fighters hide behind human shields. Progress is slow. The YPJ are outnumbered and underequipped.  They get wounded. Yet their courage, tenacity, and skill are staggering. They earn the respect of their male colleagues, dispelling the myth that women aren’t equal to men in the military. And even as they fight ISIS, they also stand up for women’s equality when the fighting is done. Their military acumen itself should be more than enough to transform women’s lives in the Middle East and beyond.

At the Book Club, we asked Lemmon about her process. After all, her account comes to life with thousands of tiny details, yet she was not present for the battles. “I conducted interviews,” she explained, “hundreds of hours of them, using a translator. It’s really tedious to do book interviews. You sit for three hours at a time, and my process was incredibly dry. I asked them many really mundane questions, like ‘Was the tea hot?’ and ‘What color was the room?’ But those kinds of questions lead them to tell other stories.” Then “you have to triangulate their answers with what their friends say, their fellow warriors, with what you read, with what their sisters said.” In addition to the lengthy interviews, “I spent thousands of more hours YouTube watching videos.” And she went through people’s photo archives and pored over photos, gleaning details. She reached out to journalists for photos. She toured the terrain where the battles had taken place. Someone gave her a WhatsApp file from during the battle. “It’s about being a detective and trying to get the pieces to fit together.”

We asked about the status of the film—the book had been optioned by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. Lemmon explained that the production company is associated with the Bransons and is currently “very much focused on finding the right creative team, so that Kurdish creators are part of it.”

Daughters of Kobani is available for purchase from Penguin Random House.