Propaganda warfare with the outlawed PKK

"Look at the position of Kurdish women," a friend of mine living in the United States told me last year. "They impressed the American public with all those pictures of women fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL]," he added. 

Listening to him, I realized that the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its armed wing in Syria, the People's Protection Units (YPG), won the hearts of Americans not only because they were the most effective military force on the ground fighting ISIL but also for posing as a benevolent, secular movement with women enjoying the same status as men.

"But you must certainly know that in reality Kurdish women enjoy no rights at all," I told him. Having lived almost all his life abroad, he was not aware of that.

Then I recalled the funeral of the prominent Kurdish politician Şerafettin Elçi in 2012.

Everyone in the southeastern district of Cizre was out on the streets that day and the city looked gender segregated, with men on one side of the street and women on the other side. I was the only woman in the courtyard of the mosque where the religious ceremony was going to be held. While having a conversation with a civil servant who was there to pay his respect to Elçi, whom he knew from his years as a student, he told me that Turks and Kurds were different, and as an ethnic Turk, one of the first things he told me to prove his point about the difference was how women had almost no rights in the Kurdish community.  

When I went outside of the mosque, I saw the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP as it was called at that time) delegation approaching. Men were on the sides of the street while most women were on the doorsteps, roofs and windows of their houses, but the...