"Their Blood Got Mixed" by Janet Biehl

Janet Biehl, Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS (PM Press, 2022). A graphic memoir about a visit to Rojava in 2019.

Discussed at our Book Club on August 2, 2022.

Janet Biehl is the author of several books and translations around Kurdish subjects. She is a board member of the New York Kurdish Cultural Center.

In the summer of 2012 the Kurdish people of northern Syria set out to create a multiethnic society in the Middle East. Along with their Arab and Assyrian allies, they established a self-governing polity that was not only multiethnic but democratic, one that not only permitted but depended on women to participate in all social roles alongside men, including political and military roles. But in the summer of 2014 it faced an attack by ISIS, which imposed theocratic, tyrannical, femicidal rule on the parts of Syria and Iraq that it overran. But when ISIS attacked the mostly Kurdish city of Kobane, the YPG and YPJ, or people’s militias resisted and gained the support of an international coalition. They liberated village after village and in March 2019 captured ISIS’s last territory in Syria.

Around that time, two UK-based filmmakers invited the author to spend a month in Rojava making a film. She accepted, and arrived to explore the society and interview people from all walks of life about their experience in the revolutionary society. She observed the progress of the revolution and especially the effects of the war on the society. She found that the war had reinforced social solidarity among the ethnic and religious groups in Rojava. As one man in Kobane told her, as a result of the war, “Our blood got mixed.”

Their Blood Got Mixed is available for purchase from PM Press.