TY - JOUR
AU - Szekely,, Ora
AB - Abstract This article seeks to map and explain the sudden increase in the appearance of female combatants in the propaganda distributed by various parties to the Syrian civil war. Based on interviews and the analysis of online propaganda, the article argues that the importance of ideologies of gender to two of the four main participants in the Syrian civil war (specifically, the Kurdish Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD, and the Islamic State, or ISIS) has rendered gender ideology an unusually salient point of ideological cleavage in the Syrian context. This has meant that other parties to the conflict, for whom gender ideology is less important, are able to easily signal their position in relation to other conflict participants by means of policies or actions relating to women's participation in the conflict. civil war, gender, Middle East, Syria Introduction In September 2014, the government of the United Arab Emirates released photos of Major Mariam al-Mansouri, the country's first female fighter pilot, sitting in the cockpit of her plane apparently en route to lead bombing raids against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS, or Daesh in Arabic). Statements to the press confirmed that she had participated in the raids, and the Emirati ambassador joked that the American ships with whom al-Mansouri was coordinating were very surprised to hear her voice over the radio (National 2014). The story was covered with relish by the American press, and memes circulated on social media asserting that ISIS fighters were terrified of being killed by women or that being attacked by women was inherently compromising to their masculinity (Fionnuala 2015). Yet, despite these celebrations of a woman's participation in the war against ISIS (and the admission of women into the UAE's [United Arab Emirates] military academy), al-Mansouri remains one of only a handful of women in combat positions in any of the Gulf militaries, or indeed in any of the Arab militaries. While Major al-Mansouri’s role in the air raids against ISIS received an unusual amount of media attention, the publicity associated with her participation in the war was not an isolated instance. In the context of the Syrian Civil War, a number of the Arab militaries and their nonstate allies have chosen to prominently feature the participation of women in their armed forces as part of their respective propaganda efforts. This raises a question: why? I argue that efforts by a number of Arab states to publicize the participation of women in their militaries, even when that participation is in fact somewhat limited,1 are an artifact of a much larger phenomenon: the emergence of differences over ideologies of gender as a defining cleavage of the Syrian civil war.2 For two of the parties to the conflict, ISIS and the Kurdish PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or Democratic Union Party), ideologies of gender hold an unusual degree of ideological significance, although the two organizations take radically opposing positions. Because of the intense importance of gender ideology for these two conflict participants, it has come to represent an unusually salient point of cleavage in the conflict overall. This has made it possible for the other parties to the conflict to send low-cost signals to both domestic and regional audiences via the (highly publicized and sometimes propagandistic) use of female combatants. This has included, to varying degrees, the Asad regime and some of the neighboring states involved in operations against ISIS, all of whom have been able to signal their attitudes toward the war's other participants by strategically positioning themselves regarding an issue that is, in general, of limited importance to them. Ideologies of gender are not, as a rule, explicitly articulated as a central point of contention in civil wars by conflict participants. Even in those rare conflicts in which women represent a substantial proportion of combatants, ideological differences over the ideal position of women in society are rarely treated as the central focus of the conflict by either the leaders of the various parties to the conflict or by combatants themselves. But if key participants, for their own reasons, view this cleavage as being of significance, their involvement can render it unusually politically salient. While gender ideology may not be the most important point of division in the conflict, it gives those involved an easy reference point to use in positioning themselves in relation to the other participants in the war, and to signal that position publicly. This is particularly useful in that such signaling represents a low-cost way of indicating an actor's position in what is often a complex web of ideological divisions and alliances. This is precisely what appears to be occurring in Syria, as a result of the unusual importance of gender ideology for both ISIS and the PYD. The presence of two actors with such diametrically opposed and strongly held positions on this particular issue has rendered ideologies of gender an unusually significant cleavage in the ongoing war in Syria. The opposing views on gender staked out by ISIS and the Syrian Kurdish forces have demarcated two opposing ends of a spectrum. By positioning themselves along this spectrum, conflict participants can signal their support for or opposition to other actors without having to necessarily commit to costly military action, regardless of their private views on this issue. Ideological commitments (that is, the normative values and beliefs about the world upon which individuals and organizations base their policy goals and positions) can take any number of forms.3 One of ISIS's distinguishing ideological characteristics is the misogynistic, exclusionary policy toward women's participation in public life that it advocates and, when it held territory, enforced. In contrast, one of the central ideological characteristics of the PYD is its focus on gender equality and women's liberation. (The term used for this ideology among many movement adherents is “jineoloji,” which translates loosely as “the science of women.”)4 Both parties have publicly promoted their respective ideologies of gender in the context of the war (although both held these views before the conflict broke out). Conservative authoritarian states, particularly in the Gulf, looking for ways of distinguishing themselves from ISIS have therefore seized on the (still very limited) participation of women in their militaries as a powerful symbol of their repudiation of ISIS. This has, for instance, led the UAE, in which women still face significant legal and social restrictions relative to men, to promote the participation of Major al-Mansouri in the air campaign over Syria. The Asad regime has similarly promoted the presence of female soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army. In contrast, many of the loosely affiliated factions that make up the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have been far more ambivalent about their positioning in relation to ISIS and have engaged in somewhat more muted messaging in this regard. Public positioning on an issue as a means of signaling one's larger position in a conflict is a tactic that is limited neither to the issue of gender, nor to the arena of civil war—nor is gender the only, or even most important, point of ideological cleavage in the Syrian context. It does, however, merit further investigation and is the focus of this article. I begin by laying out a theory of cleavage-based signaling. After a brief discussion of methodology, it will then move on to a comparison among the various parties to the conflict. I begin with the “spectrum definers,” that is, ISIS and the PYD, which establish the two opposing positions with regard to ideologies of gender. I then move on to the other participants in the war, analyzing the ways in which each has used the participation of women, or not, to signal their position in relation to other parties to the conflict. Based on an analysis of the propaganda produced by both state and nonstate participants in the Syrian war, as well as interviews with Kurdish political activists in Turkey (who can be considered “fellow travelers” of the Syrian Kurdish movement), the article demonstrates that women's participation was strategically highlighted by some of those involved in the war as a low-cost means of signaling their position in the conflict more broadly. Cleavages and Signaling in Complex Civil Wars To the extent that it is possible to generalize about civil wars, it is fair to say that they are rarely simple, two-party conflicts characterized by a struggle for power over a single issue, or even confined to a single state. Most are better understood as complex conflict systems, frequently involving multiple state and nonstate actors and featuring multiple ideological cleavages. Some may be related to regional (north versus south), linguistic (French versus English), or religious (Protestant versus Catholic) identities, while others may be ideological in nature (leftist versus rightist, fundamentalist versus secularist, etc.). These cleavages may emerge from the “bottom-up,” as a result of communal or ideological grievances (Wood 2003), or they may be created from the “top-down,” as a result of elite manipulation (Brass 1974; Gagnon 1994; Kuran 1998). Often both sets of dynamics are at work, and multiple cleavages are usually present in the same conflict, either concurrently or consecutively. Moreover, these larger ideological disputes (which Kalyvas refers to as “master cleavages”) often mask local rivalries (Kalyvas 2006) or family and social connections that shape the ways in which both recruitment and defection occur (Weinstein 2006; Parkinson 2013; McLauchlin 2015). These broad master cleavages are nevertheless important, both in recruiting fighters and mobilizing supporters across broad swathes of territory, and in unifying members of large fighting forces who may have very different preferences and experiences. Importantly, no matter which cleavages characterize a given conflict, not all parties involved will care equally about each of them. For some factions, religious identity will matter a great deal and regional identity not at all. For others, political ideology may only be important insofar as it maps on to linguistic identity.5 (Many militant groups therefore spend a great deal of time and energy trying to convince potential constituents and patrons that their own preferred cleavage is in fact what the war is “really” about [Szekely 2016].) Therefore, while a militant group may have little flexibility on those issues that are central to its mission or self-image, there may be some room to maneuver on issues about which it cares less. And yet, even if not all participants in the war are fighting over the same issues, they still need to be able to publicly position themselves in relation to other conflict participants. This is least in part due to reputational factors, for both state and nonstate actors. For nonstate military actors, who often rely on foreign sponsors and local constituents for the resources they need, reputation may be tied to their ability to obtain important resources. Foreign support (often necessary for the procurement of guns and funding and sometimes for access to military bases abroad [Byman 2005]) can be either positively or negatively affected by its perceived relationships with other organizations; a group seen as linked with a pariah organization might have far more trouble securing foreign backing than one that has successfully distanced itself from such a group. Locally, a group that is well-liked in its own community will find it far easier to avoid detection by state forces, recruit new fighters, and raise funds (Guevara 1961; Mao 1961; Chaliand 1982; Weinstein 2006). Being allied (or perceived as allied) with such a group can bring similar benefits. Conversely, association with an unpopular group can lessen an organization's ability to secure those assets. This is also true of state participants. Being associated with an armed group that is widely disliked, or that it simply cannot control (Bapat 2012), can make it more difficult for the state to find more useful proxy militias later on or to build alliances with other states involved in the conflict. It can also lead local populations to distrust the intentions of the state, if it is associated with factions perceived as predatory or otherwise harmful to the local population. For some states, there are also domestic political incentives to distance themselves from an armed group with a negative reputation (Salehyan, Siroky, and Wood 2014). In sum, it is useful for all participants in a conflict to be able to signal their position in relation to one another to a range of audiences, including local populations and outside observers, both of whom may be important sources of support, and other conflict participants, who are themselves trying to figure out who their potential friends and adversaries are.6 But if signaling one's position vis-à-vis the other conflict participants is important, it can also be costly.7 One of the clearest ways for one group to signal how it views another is to either attack it or come to its aid when under attack. Most civil war participants, however, prefer to avoid the risks involved in such a strategy, particularly if the adversary is either a much more powerful militant group or the regime itself. It may be preferable to make clear where the group's loyalties lie without actually committing military forces to do so. But while verbal declarations are relatively low-cost, they may be less credible than concrete actions. Ideological positioning can help solve this problem. Because of the multiple cleavages characterizing most complex conflict systems, nonstate actors often have some options in this regard, particularly because not all participants in a given conflict necessarily care equally about all of them. Taking a specific policy position on a cleavage about which the organization does not care very much can be a low-cost and effective means of positioning the organization as an ally or antagonist to another organization. In the Syrian Civil War, divisions over gender ideology represent just such a cleavage. It is widely accepted that beliefs about the nature and political implications of class, religion, or national identity constitute ideologies. The same is true of beliefs about the significance and appropriateness of gender roles. This is sometimes so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible: Peterson argues that the construction of implicitly hierarchical categories of gender leads to a naturalization of the privileging of the masculine over the feminine and of men over women (Peterson 2010), while Enloe finds that ideas about gender roles pervade and shape international politics, conflict, and economics (Enloe 2014). At other times, these beliefs are made explicit, as components of political doctrine, party platforms, or propaganda. This has been explored in some detail in the literature on social movements and contentious politics, particularly regarding Islamic politics in the Middle East. Zuhur has argued that gender ideologies are of particular doctrinal importance for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (although she also finds that there is rather more flexibility with regard to women's behavior in practice than exists in theory) (Zuhur 1992), while Robinson and Badran have argued that ideologies of gender played important roles in the political conflicts associated with the processes of nationalist mobilization, state formation, and consolidation in Indonesia and Egypt (Badran 1996; Robinson 2008). More broadly, Ahmed has explored the ways in which women's behavior has become a battleground between state power, personal agency, and larger social movements in the Muslim world (including among American Muslims) (Ahmed 2014). If ideologies of gender matter for social movements and political parties, they can also be important to nonstate actors engaged in armed conflict. Research on gender and conflict suggests that beliefs about gender can shape armed conflict in a range of ways and that armed conflict itself has the potential to shape the ways in which gender is socially constructed. Enloe has argued that nationalist ideologies (and nationalist movements) often treat women as symbols, rather than citizens or active participants (Enloe 2014), while the nature of militarism as an ideology privileges and reproduces certain social constructions of masculinity and femininity (Enloe 1988, 2000). On the other hand, Melzer suggests that the very participation of women in political violence challenges and upends dominant ideologies of gender (Melzer 2015). Scholarship on women as soldiers (Enloe 2000; Baaz and Stern 2013), guerrillas (Kampwirth 2002; Viterna 2006), terrorists (Bloom 2012), and even wartime rapists (Cohen 2013; Sjoberg 2016) has examined the motives and experiences of women in conflict in great depth. Some of this research suggests that women are broadly motivated by the same communal grievances that mobilize men (Thomas and Bond 2015; Tezcür 2016) and that individual biographical (Viterna 2006) or social factors (Kampwirth 2002) are therefore more likely to determine whether an individual woman becomes a soldier. While there is evidence that women are more likely to join leftist organizations (Henshaw 2016; Wood and Thomas 2017), in general, women appear to be motivated by a range of factors as varied as those that drive men to join armed movements. Taken together, one implication of the scholarship on gender and armed conflict is that, as with other ideological positions, while gender ideology and organizational practice may be linked for many individuals, at the organizational level they should not be conflated. An organization can recruit women without explicitly including a feminist articulation of women's rights in its political platform (the Palestinian movement Hamas being an excellent example).8 Conversely, while leftist ideology might make it more likely that an armed group will recruit women, there are certainly armed groups that champion gender equality in theory without doing much to promote it internally (Wood and Thomas 2017).9 In other words, armed groups (and states) can be as hypocritical about gender ideologies as they can about any other ideology. If leaders of Marxist-Leninist movements can accrue enormous personal wealth once they take power while still claiming to be “communists” or “revolutionaries” (Libya's Qadhafi and Zimbabwe's Mugabe being only two examples), then we should not be surprised if leaders of groups claiming to be “feminist” turn a blind eye to sexual assault within their ranks. And while a militia leader might publicly espouse particular views or enforce specific policies about women's roles in public life out of genuine conviction, he might also do so because, even though he does not much care one way or another, expressing that opinion allows him to signal sympathy with or opposition to another organization. In sum, beliefs about gender function much as other ideologies do. Even when explicitly professed, gender ideologies may be genuinely held or publicly embraced for reasons of political expediency. (Both can, of course, be true, but need not be.) And, as much as any other ideology, beliefs about gender have the potential to function as demarcating characteristics in a given conflict system if they are sufficiently important to some conflict participants. Research Design: Comparing within the Syrian Case Methodologically, this article takes a comparative approach, both mapping out the positions on gender ideology of the major parties to the Syrian conflict and comparing their behavior. This includes all four of the major domestic participants in the civil war as well as the Arab state patrons of the Free Syrian Army (in large part because the FSA itself is so incoherent that it is necessary to look to its patrons to provide as complete a picture as possible of the group's motivations).10 I begin with profiles of the Syrian Kurdish forces and ISIS, the “spectrum defining” organizations whose focus on ideologies of gender has rendered this an unusually powerful cleavage in the Syrian conflict. This is followed by an examination of the ways in which gender ideology has impacted the behavior of the other parties to the conflict, who have used this cleavage to signal their positions relative to one another. The comparison of these organizations, particularly the characterization of their public ideological positioning, is based on a range of primary and secondary sources. For the Kurdish case, interviews were conducted with members of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, which is closely linked ideologically to that in Syria. This included former Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK) combatants (interviewed in Hamburg, Germany) as well as current political activists (interviewed in Istanbul). The interviews were conducted in a range of settings, including but not limited to the offices of a women's rights organization in Istanbul and at a conference for women in the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, or People's Democratic Party, the major Kurdish political party in Turkey). Other propaganda materials, which are widely available online and distributed by the Kurdish movement itself, were also used to complete the picture. For practical reasons, it was not possible to conduct interviews with members of ISIS, and so the profile of ISIS instead relies on the group's own propaganda and doctrine as articulated in its magazines (Al Dabiq and Al Rumiyeh) and in other forms of propaganda, including material originally in Arabic and designed for audiences already in Syria and Iraq. This allows for a comprehensive portrait of the group's gender ideology as they themselves wish it to be understood, both by those already within the movement and by prospective recruits. The profiles of the positions of the FSA, their foreign allies, and the Syrian military are based on both their behavior and their propaganda. The latter includes videos produced by several FSA factions and state propaganda materials produced by the Syrian, Jordanian, and Emirati governments. Gender Ideology in the Syrian Arena To state the obvious, the conflict in Syria is extraordinarily complicated. Put simply, it can be said to have four major axes: the Asad regime, backed by Russia and Iran; the fragmented FSA coalition, whose disparate factions have at various points been backed by some of the Gulf states, Jordan, and Turkey; the Syrian Kurdish PYD, backed by the Turkish Kurdish PKK and the United States; and ISIS, which has had limited backing from outside parties, at least openly. The conflict between these parties is characterized by four major narratives, or sites of cleavage: religion (Sunnis versus Alawites and secularists versus fundamentalists), ethnolinguistic identity (Arabs versus Kurds), gender ideology (exclusion versus inclusion of women) and political ideology (Asadist authoritarianism versus democratization). Each is both emphasized by some participants as being the “real” cause of the war and dismissed by others as a false narrative. Of the four, the first two have received far more attention in the international media, and none are as simple as they may immediately appear. While there is clearly tension between the Sunni majority and the ruling Alawite minority, there are also Sunnis loyal to the regime and Alawites who oppose it.11 Nested within the intercommunal religious cleavage is an intra-Sunni division between fundamentalists seeking a religious government and secularists who prefer a secular and/or democratic one. Religious identity is also far from homogenous, being bisected on both sides by ethnolinguistic identity—there are both Sunni and Alawite Kurds and Sunni and Alawite Arabs. Kurds are more likely to prioritize their Kurdish identity and Arabs their religious identity, but this is far from universally true. The two ideological cleavages—namely gender ideology and authoritarianism—have received less attention than the two communal cleavages but have proved politically useful for at least some parties to the conflict. Within the opposition there are clear distinctions between the authoritarian-leaning factions (which are often but not always also religious fundamentalists) and the pro-democracy factions. Ideologies of gender have been less explicitly addressed, and are perhaps the least obviously salient of the four, but have still proved important for at least some of the participants. Finally, the complexities of these distinctions have arguably created a fifth, meta-cleavage: the divergence between the parties as to which division is most important. Each of these cleavages has different political utility for each of the parties to the conflict in terms of how large a support base it might allow each to mobilize.12 For ISIS, for instance, a narrative pitting Sunnis against Shi'ites would provide a larger base of potential recruits and supporters than a narrative based on regime type, since there are far more Syrians who see themselves as Sunnis than there are Syrians interested in living in an authoritarian pseudocaliphate. The most successful movements will be those able to establish whichever cleavage provides them with the largest possible constituency as the central cleavage in the conflict, or at least the most important one in the eyes of their target audience. This analysis is focused on one of these cleavages—ideologies of gender—because it is (a) underexamined in the analysis of the Syrian war and (b) unusually important in Syria. Ideologies of gender have come to hold an important place in the constellation of narratives defining the Syrian conflict ecosystem. For both the PYD and ISIS, their ideologies of gender—not merely their behavior—represent defining features of each organization and have since they were founded. The unusual importance of gender ideology to two of the major participants in the war has made it possible for other parties to the conflict—the Asad regime on the one hand, and the Free Syrian Army and its backers on the other—to signal their positions in relation to other conflict participants by positioning themselves relative to this cleavage, even though it is less ideologically important to them than it is to either the Syrian Kurdish forces or to ISIS. The result has been a subtle but noticeable shift in the use of gendered propaganda by all participants. The Spectrum Definers The Syrian Kurdish Forces If ideologies of gender exist on a spectrum, then, in the context of the Syrian civil war, one end of that spectrum is demarcated by the explicitly inclusive position on women's rights staked out by the Kurdish PYD and its armed wings, the YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, or People's Protection Units) and YPJ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, or Women's Protection Units). Roughly 10 percent of the population of Syria is ethnically Kurdish,13 and the Kurdish national movement in Syria has existed for nearly a century. It has historically been both weaker and more fragmented than its counterparts in Iraq and Turkey (Allsopp 2015, 86); during the Ottoman and French Mandate periods, urban-rural divisions prevented the emergence of a unified political movement, and politically active Kurdish intellectuals were often members of the Syrian Communist Party (Gunter 2014, 10). However, in the late 1950s, Kurdish politics in Syria became more explicitly nationalist, influenced by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in neighboring Iraq (Allsopp 2015, 73–98). Kurdish resentments were exacerbated by both political and economic disenfranchisement, as Kurdish areas faced neglect by the state and some two hundred thousand Kurds were classified as noncitizens (either as “ajanib,” meaning foreigners, or “maktoumeen,” unregistered) in the early 1960s (Gunter 2014, 17). The regime, for its part, viewed Kurdish nationalism as a threat to its authority and to the wider political project of Arab nationalism. Kurdish towns were given Arabic names, the teaching of Kurdish was discouraged (Gunter 2014, 21), and Kurdish activists faced arrest and torture at the hands of the Syrian secret police (Allsopp 2015).14 But if the Syrian government viewed the Syrian Kurdish community and its leadership with distrust, it was still willing to reach an accommodation with Kurdish nationalists in other states if such an alliance served its broader regional objectives. Such was the case with the PKK, a Kurdish militant group in Turkey that been fighting the Turkish state on and off since the late 1970s under the leadership of the charismatic, and autocratic, ideologue Abdullah Öcalan (Marcus 2007; Eccarius-Kelly 2011).15 As a means of putting pressure on the Turkish state (viewed as a threat by Syria for a range of reasons, including its membership in NATO), the Asad regime allowed the PKK to use Syria as a base of operations for much of the 1980s and 1990s.16 In return, the PKK refrained from explicitly addressing the status of the Kurds in Syria, instead mobilizing them in support of its attempts to carve out an independent Kurdistan in Turkey. The relationship between the two therefore had the added benefit for the Asad regime of providing an external outlet for Kurdish nationalist sentiment; during this period, thousands of Syrian Kurds (who were allowed to substitute membership in the PKK for military service in the Syrian army) fought with the PKK against the Turkish government (Allsopp 2015, 103–4). As many as ten thousand may have been killed (Gunter 2014, 40). But this bargain collapsed in 1999 when, in response to the shifting balance of power that followed the end of the Cold War, the Syrian government expelled Öcalan, who was soon captured and imprisoned by Turkey (Marcus 2007). This left the PKK with no incentive to discourage a challenge to the Syrian state by its Syrian Kurdish allies, and in 2003 a Syrian Kurdish affiliate of the PKK was founded: the PYD.17 In March of 2004, Kurdish resentment, which had only intensified since Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father in 2000, boiled over in the form of the Qamishli Uprising. What began as hostility between Arab and Kurdish football fans escalated into antigovernment protests and riots in which forty-three people were killed across Syria, all but seven of them Kurds (Tejel 2008, 108–16). Nevertheless, despite the shifting position of the Syrian Kurdish population vis-à-vis the Syrian state, at least in its early years the PYD remained closely tied to the PKK and oriented toward the PKK's larger ideological project. While the PYD's formal leadership is currently held jointly by Shahoz Hasan and Aysha Hisso,18 the organization looks to Öcalan as its ideological guide, and his teachings continue to inform the group's goals (PYD 2017).19 While in the 1980s and 1990s the PKK sought independence for the Kurds, since the early 2000s both the PKK's objectives and those of its affiliates have been focused on regional autonomy for Kurds coupled with the implementation of a form of local direct democratic governance known as “democratic confederalism” as theorized by the anarchist writer Murray Bookchin, whose work Öcalan read in prison.20 This goal, along with a focus on cultural pluralism, regional autonomy, and environmental protection, has been explicitly embraced by both the PKK and the PYD (PKK 2015). Thus far, this political project has arguably been more fully implemented in the Kurdish regions of Syria than in Turkey (or indeed anywhere else). This is largely due to the establishment of three independent cantons in northern Syria, referred to collectively by Kurds as Rojava. The PKK, in contrast, has never achieved this degree of autonomy on Turkish territory. The PYD's growing autonomy and the evolving nature of the war in Syria (particularly American involvement in support of the Syrian Kurds and their allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF) has meant that the interests of the PYD and the PKK are sometimes different, though not necessarily at odds. Nevertheless, the two organizations remain extremely close and have participated in joint military operations against ISIS in northern Syria, most significantly in the defense of the Yazidi Kurds against attempted genocide by ISIS (Shelton 2014). One area where the PYD most obviously shares ideological DNA with the PKK is its ideology of gender. Like the PKK, the PYD advocates an explicitly feminist and egalitarian political model, which has become a central component of the movement's ideological identity. The ideological emphasis on women's empowerment, while present early in the movement's history, was at the beginning less a result of the organization's Kurdish identity than of its leftist ideology. Some of those interviewed also credited the emerging women's rights movement within the Turkish left in the late 1970s,21 the influence of women in the organization in its early years,22 or the organization's leadership more broadly. (Öcalan's philosophy, said one of the activists interviewed, “gives a card” to Kurdish women in their struggle for equality with Kurdish men.)23 Whatever its origins, the emphasis on women's rights proved attractive to Kurdish women,24 leading to increased participation by women in the movement, which in turn increased the focus on women's liberation, creating a feedback loop that ultimately resulted in the strong ideological emphasis on women's liberation that exists in both the PKK and PYD today.25 This focus on women's empowerment and liberation now represents a major component of the movement's self-conception. This is expressed both in its armed forces and in its political platform and activities. In the PKK, women make up as much as 40 percent of the armed force and serve alongside men in mixed units as commanders as well as foot soldiers.26 (By comparison, women currently make up approximately 16 percent of the American and Canadian militaries and can serve in the Turkish military only as officers.) Echoing the PKK's policies, women also make up a substantial proportion of the PYD's armed wing. The current Syrian Kurdish armed forces were first established in 2011. Drawing on small, PYD-allied armed groups that began to appear in the Syrian Kurdish areas in the aftermath of the 2004 Qamishli uprising, a “self-defense” force was created, which was formally organized as the People's Protection Units (the YPG, or Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) in 2012. Its command staff included both men and women, though women were outnumbered by men in the enlisted ranks. In 2013, in response to the arrival of female PKK fighters in Syria, some of them officers or soldiers with significant combat experience, a separate women's force, the Women's Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, or YPJ), was established (Knapp, Ayboga, and Flach 2016, 133–36).27 The YPJ now fights alongside the YPG, with little distinction between the two. Perhaps the best known operation was the successful defense of the Kurdish town of Kobane during its lengthy siege by ISIS forces, led by YPJ commander Meysa Abdo (Dirik 2014). Since its foundation, women's liberation and empowerment have been central to the PYD's stated political objectives. Yekîtiya Star (founded in 2005 and renamed Kongreya Star in 2016), the PYD women's union, engaged in social and political outreach and education for women, even publishing a newspaper (Knapp et al. 2016, 64–65). Since the establishment of the independent cantons in Rojava, women's activists have pushed for legislation banning domestic violence, child marriage, and polygamy (Knapp et al. 2016, 66–67). Women's rights are further guaranteed in Articles 27 and 28 of the “social contract” that serves as an effective constitution for Rojava (YPG International 2016). None of this is meant to suggest that the PYD, its associated fighting forces, or Rojava itself have eliminated all social or political practices and structures that directly or indirectly disadvantage women and privilege men. But it does demonstrate the centrality of gender ideology to the PYD's self-conception and larger political project. Moreover, the PYD's ideology of gender, at least as much as (if not more than) its ideology of class, has been central to the way in which it has chosen to present itself to outsiders, particularly in the context of its conflict with ISIS. One major means by which the PYD (like most of the parties to the war in Syria) distributes propaganda is through videos on the internet. A search for “YPJ” on YouTube produces a slew of videos with titles like “YPJ – Female Fighters of Kurdistan” or “YPJ Kurdish Female Fighters” (Ahmad 2014; PirateKurd 2015). The YPG's press office has its own YouTube channel that features a host of such videos, some with relatively high production values and English subtitles (YPG Press Office 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Most feature interviews with female combatants, many of whom speak explicitly about the idea that ISIS members are scared of fighting and being killed by women. Some involve catchy background music over footage of women fighters doing training drills, studying, or performing other activities (Kurdish Woman War 2014), while others rely more heavily on interview footage, sometimes from major news stations. Similarly, a (now defunct) YouTube channel calling itself the YPJ Media Center featured videos of fighters dancing, comforting civilians (speaking both Arabic and Kurdish), giving candy to children, and, tellingly, helping women and girls remove the heavy, black face coverings imposed by ISIS in areas under its control (YPJ mediacenter 2016, 2017).28 The role of women fighters has consistently been a central part of the party's messaging in publicizing and promoting particular military operations. This was true, for instance, of their successful expulsion (with the assistance of American air support) of ISIS forces from the town of Manbij. Pro-PYD Twitter accounts, as well as more mainstream news outlets, circulated pictures of civilian women burning the robes that they had been forced to wear while under ISIS's rule and gleefully smoking cigarettes in public.29 Many of the pictures circulated also featured female fighters, wearing Kurdish scarves around their necks and toting guns, hugging civilians in Manbij. The message conveyed was that ISIS had not just been defeated militarily—its ideology had been both repudiated by the population and, by virtue of its defeat by a female fighting force, discredited based on its own metrics. The co-president of the Syrian Democratic Council, Ilham Ahmed, stated explicitly that the role of women in fighting ISIS is particularly important given the latter's targeting of female civilians. When asked by the author about the role of women in combating ISIS, she replied by referencing the important example that the YPJ represented for the Yazidi and Christian women captured and enslaved by ISIS, stating that the creation of the YPJ represents “a revolution.” She added with a smile that ISIS is “really scared of fighting women.”30 Perhaps ironically, the presence of female fighters in the campaign against ISIS has led to what some commentators have viewed as an orientalist fetishization of women fighters in the Western media (Dirik 2014). YPJ fighters are frequently described as “badass” (Salih 2014) and sometimes referred to in sexualized ways (Sun 2016). This coverage is usually entirely divorced from the actual ideology of the YPJ or the political goals of the fighters in question, which in many cases are diametrically opposed to those of the commentators praising them. The YPJ's Marxist political platform is rather at odds with the editorial line taken by the very conservative Breitbart.com, for instance, but the website has nonetheless published admiring commentary on its female fighters and their operations against ISIS (Heine 2014; Chastain 2016). Instead of politicized actors, advocating a specific political project, women in the Kurdish forces are framed as being a sort of human rebuke to ISIS; their presence matters more than their personal views or political goals. This does not mean that gender discrimination has been eliminated in either the PYD or its military wings. But even if gender equality is not perfectly implemented in practice, it remains a major component of the Kurdish movement's publicly stated ideology. For the PYD and its military forces, gender equality remains a major part of their ideological platform, one which they have publicly promoted. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) At what is quite obviously the other end of the spectrum lies the organization calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As is the case for the PYD, ISIS's beliefs about gender constitute a central feature of its ideology. The organization adheres to and promotes a set of explicit, prescriptive beliefs about the roles of women and men in society and has used the enforcement of those laws as a means of signifying its authority in the areas it controls. The similarities between the two, however, end there. Following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, Al Qaeda took advantage of the resultant power vacuum to establish a branch in Iraq. This became known, at least to American journalists and analysts, as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), though internally it was referred to as “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers.”31 Following the death of its first leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in a US airstrike in 2006, the movement's leadership became more interested in establishing an Islamic state in Iraq and apparently began using the name “Islamic State” in its internal documents. This brought AQI into conflict with the central leadership of Al Qaeda, in particular Ayman Zawahiri, who felt that any attempt at establishing an Islamic state while the US military remained in Iraq was doomed to failure and would undercut the movement's credibility (McCants 2015, 12; Zawahiri 2005). These tensions were brought out into the open by the onset of the Syrian civil war and the increased instability it created in Iraq. In addition to the tension over whether or not to declare the establishment of a caliphate, Syria itself was another subject of dispute. Despite the fact that Jabhat al-Nusra, an indigenous Syrian militant group, had been designated as the “official” Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, AQI also harbored ambitions there. In 2013, AQI moved first into eastern Syria and then into a number of areas it had previous held in Iraq. By June of 2014 it had taken the Syrian city of Raqqa and the cities of Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq. This rapid expansion posed a challenge to Zawahiri's authority and to Jabhat al-Nusra's position in Syria, leading to AQI's expulsion from Al Qaeda. Thereafter, it rebranded itself as Al Dawlet al Islami fi Iraq wa Sham (the acronym for which is “Daesh” in Arabic), which translates as the Islamic State in Iraq and (greater) Syria, or ISIS. Because of its roots in Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS retains some of Zarqawi's ideological fingerprints, including a particularly virulent hatred of Shi'ites (Al Dabiq 2016b, 2016c) and an intense opposition to the Jordanian and Gulf monarchies (Al Dabiq 2016a). Among ISIS's other defining characteristics is a strongly asserted and deeply institutionalized misogyny, as a matter of both policy and ideology. The list of policy prescriptions regarding women's behavior in the territory under ISIS's control is a lengthy one. Women's clothing was heavily regulated; they were required to wear a long black robe, gloves, thick socks, headscarf, and face covering whenever leaving the house, a practice not adhered to by the majority of Muslim women in Syria and Iraq. Women were banned from leaving the house without a male escort, and ISIS imposed fines and punishments for infractions such as lifting a veil to eat or wearing a headscarf deemed too thin (Callimachi 2016). Women's access to medical care was limited by prohibitions on male doctors seeing female patients, and girls’ education was greatly curtailed (Human Rights Watch 2016). These regulations, imposed over a matter of months, were strictly enforced by the “morality police” known as Al Hisba, with violations carrying penalties ranging from fines to whipping for both women and their husbands (Callimachi 2016). If the policies imposed on women who ISIS considered to be part of their constituency (that is, Sunni Muslims) were brutal, its treatment of those it considered infidels (Shi'ites, Yazidis, and others) was far more so. Beginning in 2014, an estimated 3,500 Yazidi women and girls, some as young as ten years old, were subjected to abduction, enslavement, and rape. Human Rights Watch has asserted that these actions should be considered crimes against humanity (Human Rights Watch 2016), and an international commission of inquiry convened under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council has determined that ISIS's actions against the Yazidis constitute a genocide (Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic 2016). There is some evidence that, at least for some of ISIS's fighters, enforcing these policies was less motivated by ideology than by a desire to exact revenge on personal enemies or local rivals, real or perceived (Al Aqeedi 2016).32 Nevertheless, these policies were, and should be seen as, reflective of a specific ideological stance. ISIS's response to allegations that it condoned and even encouraged child rape is instructive in this regard. While some Twitter accounts associated with ISIS initially claimed that accounts of the enslavement and rape of women and girls were lies, these defensive responses were followed by an article in ISIS's official magazine, Al Dabiq, defending the practice as sanctioned by the Qur'an and Hadith (Al Dabiq 2015). In a later issue, condemnation of ISIS's abduction and enslavement of women by outsiders (“kufr” or unbelievers) is addressed with mocking disbelief: Are slave girls whom we took by Allah's command better, or prostitutes—an evil you do not denounce—who are grabbed by quasi-men in the lands of kufr where you live? A prostitute in your lands comes and goes, openly committing sin. She lives by selling her honor, within the sight and hearing of the deviant scholars from whom we don't hear even a faint sound. As for the slave girl that was taken by the swords of men following the cheerful warrior (Muhammad—sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam), then her enslavement is in opposition to human rights and copulation with her is rape?! What is wrong with you? How do you make such a judgment? What is your religion? What is your law? (Al Muhajjirah 2015, 48–49) While Al Dabiq, published mostly in English, functions primarily as a means of promoting ISIS's ideology (and challenging its critics) outside the Arab world, the status of women is a theme in ISIS's propaganda directed at Arab audiences as well. An Arabic pamphlet disseminated by the Al Khansaa Brigade, ISIS's women's organization, whose title translates as the “Woman in the Islamic State” is one particularly colorful example. The text describes a heavily propagandized version of life for women under ISIS's rule for the purpose of recruiting Arab women. The anonymous authors offer an explicit comparison between the way of life available to women in the Islamic state versus those parts of the Muslim world that have fallen into the “trap” of emulating the West. In the ideal world presented by the Al Khansaa Brigade's writers, women are valued, but never equal. Being a wife and mother is their only important role in life. They are provided for by their husbands or male relatives and need never (and indeed, should never) leave the house. Women's education is focused solely on Islamic law and homemaking and should end by age fifteen. The authors write mockingly of “Westernized” women who, seeking to prove they are equal to men, travel to study “the brain cells of crows, grains of sand, and the arteries of fish” (Al Khansaa Brigade 2015, 28–29). While a rejection of women's participation in politics and public life is not unique to ISIS (it is shared, for instance, by Boko Haram, which has loosely affiliated itself with ISIS), both its extreme stance and the centrality of this view to its ideology stand out even among Islamist groups. Organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which ISIS considers an enemy, do not adhere to the same policies or ideologies about women. The Palestinian group Hamas, for instance, while certainly a conservative Islamic organization, does not advocate the exclusion of women from society and in fact included several women in its 2006 parliamentary delegation.33 This is not to say that these groups do not have an ideology of gender—they do. But in most cases, their ideologies fall at a very different point on the spectrum than do ISIS's and, for most, do not constitute a central feature of their political platforms or a means by which they distinguish themselves from their rivals. In short, like the PYD, ISIS has built at least part of its ideological identity on its views on women and their rights in comparison with men. In practice, of course, ISIS has carved out roles for women in both its military and governing apparatus. Female members of Al Hisba, for example, fulfill a useful role by searching and detaining other women, a job that ISIS's own worldview prohibits men from doing. There are also indications that ISIS has used women to recruit other women online. But none of this represents any actual interest in women's empowerment; ideologically, ISIS remains committed to a deeply exclusionary and misogynistic ideology of gender. Other Participants in the Civil War That ISIS and the PYD promote diametrically opposing ideologies of gender is not in and of itself particularly surprising. Far more interesting is how their adherence to their respective ideologies of gender has established gender ideology as an important cleavage in the civil war and led many of the other parties to take a position on gender as a means of signaling their alignment vis-à-vis the two spectrum-definers. This has meant that other actors involved in Syria have engaged in public signaling behavior that represents a departure from their existing policies, actual behavior, or both. Sudden formations of women's brigades, newly publicized participation of women in the military, and propaganda videos highlighting women's involvement in the conflict are less about the women themselves than they are a means of signaling how the actor in question wishes to be seen in relation to the other participants in the conflict. The Asad Regime Although changes in women's social roles did serve as a symbol of the Baathist state's modernizing political project, neither misogyny nor a focus on women's empowerment are central to Baathist ideology as they are for ISIS and the PYD. But the Asad regime has nevertheless capitalized on ISIS's misogyny as a means of both attempting to frame itself as a bulwark against ISIS's broader political and territorial ambitions and as a way of branding itself as the most feasible (and perhaps only) alternative. Historically, when the Baathist regime in Syria has addressed issues of women's rights, it has done so in the context of a broader secularizing and modernizing state project, rather than as a policy goal for its own sake. In the 1970s, Hafez al Asad (father of the current Syrian leader, Bashar al Asad) implemented a range of policies intended to “modernize” Syria, similar to the policies being implemented in other postcolonial states in the Middle East and around the world. These included educational reforms that increased women's (and men's) access to education and policies that increased (at least urban, educated) women's participation in the workforce. Article 25 of the 1973 constitution guarantees equal rights to all Syrians regardless of gender (Kelly and Breslin 2010, 459). The Baathist government also promoted the formation of women's organizations (under Baath party control) as part of its broader project of mass mobilization and social renewal (Meininghaus 2016). However, this did not represent an ideological commitment to a more profound change in the nature of gender relations in Syrian society or to the elimination of all legislative discrimination against women (Kelly and Breslin 2010, 460–61). Moreover, Bashar al Asad has not demonstrated a notable commitment to women's rights in the context of the civil war. Rape is widely used as a regime weapon against civilians, including in house-to-house searches. It is also employed as a means of torture against female prisoners in the regime's prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). Nevertheless, the Asad regime has found the cleavage over gender ideology politically useful in two important ways: firstly, as a way of reinforcing the ethno-communal narrative on which the regime has increasingly relied and, secondly (and relatedly), as a way to emphasize its antagonism toward ISIS. The Asad regime has thus far managed to retain power by promoting two specific narratives of the conflict, one primarily for domestic consumption and one intended for both domestic and international audiences. The first, a sectarian narrative, frames the Asad regime as the defender of minority rights in Syria against a dangerous Sunni majority represented by the more extreme “jihadist” rebel factions and ISIS. This narrative is primarily directed at the Alawite and Christian communities in Syria. The second narrative frames the conflict as being about the forces of secularism, modernity, and stability against the forces of religious terrorism and sectarianism in the form of ISIS (which the regime and its supporters often conflate with the FSA).34 This narrative is intended both for domestic audiences and for the regime's foreign allies, as a means of positioning the Asad regime as the only possible alternative to ISIS. Both narratives can be, and have been, supported by signaling through ideologies of gender. This is possible in part because they are in some ways linked; one of the components of the sectarian narrative is that Christians and Alawites are more secular than the Sunni majority. This narrative in turn carries a gendered component, in that more secular women are often assumed to be more liberated (Sly and Ramadan 2013).35 At the same time, ISIS's highly publicized misogyny and exclusion of women from public life makes women's participation in the armed forces an easy way to signal a repudiation of their political program. It is within this context that the establishment and composition of the Syrian army's all-women's battalion can be understood. Known as Asad's Lionesses, it is, by most accounts, composed almost exclusively of Alawites. An all-volunteer force of as many as five hundred to eight hundred soldiers, it primarily guards checkpoints to free up other units for combat (Sohlman 2013; Leduc 2015). Given the rate of defections from the Syrian army and the number of young men seeking to avoid the draft, the establishment of the unit may be at least in part a practical solution to the military's severe shortage of soldiers. However, a cursory Google search demonstrates that it is also used—quite extensively—for propaganda purposes. YouTube contains a wide assortment of videos that feature interviews with female soldiers in the Syrian military and footage of women training, riding in trucks, and handling weapons, often set to music (SovereignSyria 2014; RT 2016; SAMA TV 2017). Still photos presumably released by the Syrian military to a range of outlets show women loading shells, marching in formation, and laughing while eating lunch (Sanadiki 2015). A 2015 report by the French news channel France24 notes that “photos of these female fighters flooded news agencies at the end of last month—the exact moment that Assad told the American television station CBS (on March 27) that he was open to dialogue with the United States” (Leduc 2015). The messaging in these pieces of propaganda is multilayered, but at its core it is meant to legitimize the Asad regime by framing it as a defender of secularism and a bulwark against ISIS. The use of female combatants as symbols to promote this message is made possible by their increased symbolic and ideological salience in the Syrian civil war. If ISIS did not exist, and Asad's military instead found itself fighting primarily against a secessionist Kurdish force comprised of 40 percent female soldiers, it seems unlikely that the regime's propaganda would look the same. The Opposition Of all the parties to the Syrian conflict, the anti-Asad rebels are by far the most difficult about which to generalize, largely because they are less a single fighting force than a collection of semiallied militias, often with very different agendas and ideologies. While early in the war the armed opposition was unified under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, in the war's later years, the opposition fractured. Some groups that were previously part of the FSA have morphed into autonomous entities. One aspect of this fragmentation is that different rebel factions espouse very different policies regarding women. Generally, because (as of this writing) most rebel groups both under the FSA umbrella and outside of it have seen themselves as primarily opposed to the Asad regime rather than to either ISIS or the PYD, gender-signaling has been less important as a means of indicating their position in the conflict. Therefore, while there are small numbers of women fighting with the FSA and other rebel factions, these have not tended to publicize the women's presence as enthusiastically to outsiders as the Syrian, Jordanian, and Emirati militaries have. The FSA itself has no single central leadership body. In 2011, a leadership council in exile called the Syrian National Council (SNC) was established in Turkey. In 2013 a new body known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces was formed, including both exiles and actors on the ground in Syria, under which the SNC was subsumed. Neither group has proved to be tremendously effective, but both do promote political platforms that can provide a window into the (at least official) ideological positions held by the Syrian opposition. Although equality between men and women is part of the stated principles of both, for neither entity is it a central ideological focus (“Syrian National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces” 2018; Syrian National Council 2018). Moreover, it would be a mistake to overstate the degree to which the SNC ever represented the FSA or the Syrian opposition more broadly. To the extent that it can be said to have one, the core of the FSA was initially made up of dissident officers who defected from the state military in 2011 and 2012. As local rebel groups proliferated, however, it became clear that rather than a cohesive organization the FSA was instead a loosely allied collection of factions, often with little in common save their intense opposition to the Asad regime. Some are more concerned with local security, while others are focused on broader ideological objectives at the national level. As the war has progressed, the FSA itself has essentially disintegrated into its component organizations. This has meant that it is quite difficult to generalize in any meaningful way about “the opposition's” policies or beliefs on any topic, including gender issues. It is safe to say, however, that for few, if any, of the rebel factions, either formally inside the FSA or outside of it, is gender inclusion a central issue. For several, gender exclusion is quite important. This is particularly true of some of the large, non-FSA “jihadist” rebel factions like the Al Qaeda–allied Jabhat al-Nusra, rebranded in 2018 as Hayat Tahrir al Sham. (Indeed, the organization is opposed to women fighting at all, although, like ISIS, they remain willing to employ women as suicide bombers [Davis 2013].) Because gender ideology does not represent either a major point of differentiation with their primary adversary (the Asad regime) or a substantial point of commonality with a foreign sponsor, or even a point of unity among the FSA's various member groups, emphasizing women's participation has not been particularly useful for most FSA factions. Nevertheless, by 2013 a few FSA-affiliated women's units had begun to appear. Some, like the Our Mother Aisha Brigades, are independent, while others are smaller units within otherwise entirely male fighting forces, such as the Ikhlas Brigade (Sohlman 2013). Some are attached to more moderate factions, while others to those with an explicitly Islamist political stance, although some of the latter (such as Jabhat al-Nusra) have refused to allow women in their ranks (Szanto 2016, 310–11). Videos promoting female FSA fighters are not hard to find online, including both videos of women actually fighting and those that resemble music videos, with footage of combatants intercut with graphics and other images set to music (Abd Najjar 2013; Al GadTV 2013; Ala’ Al Asaf 2013; Syria Al'an 2014). (In this, they are quite similar to videos produced by other militant groups.) There is also a subset of propaganda videos produced by various FSA factions featuring female fighters as a means of shaming men—whether Syrians or leaders of neighboring states—for not participating in the war. In one such video, a woman carrying a machine gun gives a lengthy speech to the camera, asking scathingly, “and where are the Arabs?” (sham qamshlo Sham 2012). There are, however, few accounts of these factions actually participating in battle (Atassi 2012). This, again, suggests that women's participation is being used as a form of symbolic signaling. The lack of a single, coherent trend regarding women's participation among the rebel groups therefore makes a certain amount of sense given the lack of ideological coherence in the FSA overall. Alternatively, this can be read as a way for the FSA to hedge its bets; factions that wish to signal that, while they may be fundamentalists, they are not allied with ISIS may find a few videos featuring female fighters to be a useful means of doing so. For those that are more secular, however, there is less incentive to emphasize an ideological orientation that might alienate potential allies among the more religious groups who find the overtly feminist ideology of the YPJ, for instance, to be alienating. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates If the FSA's approach to gender ideology has been somewhat murky, that taken by its foreign backers has been much clearer. Both Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have actively promoted the participation of women in their own militaries in the propaganda surrounding their involvement in the US-led coalition against ISIS in Syria. The United Arab Emirates has touted Major al-Mansouri's participation in bombing raids against ISIS, and the Jordanian military released a propaganda video celebrating Jordanian air strikes against ISIS in retaliation for the murder of Lieutenant Mu'ath Kasasbeh, which featured female mechanics in military uniform working alongside their male colleagues, and writing messages to ISIS, including verses from the Qur'an, on the bombs in chalk (ZaidAlKalaldeh 2015). But as in the case of the Syrian military, this appears to be a matter of propaganda rather than practice. The proportion of female soldiers in each military is very small. The UAE has recently reformed its rules on national military service, establishing a draft for men and allowing women between the ages of eighteen and thirty to volunteer. A new military college for women has been established, and there are small numbers of women officers (including four pilots), but they represent a small fraction of the military overall (“Women in the UAE” 2017). In Jordan, there is a higher proportion of women in the military, largely in medical and administrative positions (NATO 2006), but less than 3 percent of the officer corps is currently composed of women (NATO Support and Procurement Agency 2017). And despite the construction of the military academy in the UAE and plans to modernize an existing, similar facility in Jordan, these changes have not been matched by a broader legal shift regarding women's rights more generally.36 This suggests that the sudden interest in emphasizing the role of women in the military was, for both Jordan and the UAE, mostly a matter of signaling opposition to ISIS and emphasizing the distinction between ISIS's ideology and their own. This was important for both domestic and international audiences, especially the United States (a key ally of both Jordan and the UAE). But signaling antipathy for ISIS via a major increase in military participation would have been materially and politically costly. In Jordan, polling in 2014 showed some public ambivalence regarding Al Qaeda and other militant groups, though far less about ISIS, with only 10 percent viewing it as a legitimate resistance movement (JCSS 2014). Public antagonism toward ISIS increased markedly after the video of the torture and murder of the Jordanian pilot, Mu'ath Kasasbeh, was released online, as did support for the government's operations against ISIS (JCSS 2015). However, it is questionable whether this increase in support would have withstood a ground campaign, and there is little evidence that either the UAE or Jordan was interested in engaging in a protracted military campaign against ISIS in Syria. Therefore, propaganda repudiating one of ISIS's core values served a very useful purpose in that it represented a far simpler method of emphasizing the positions of both states to allies and to audiences at home. Conclusion A comparison of the ways in which the participants in the Syrian civil war have used gender ideology to further their own agendas produces several conclusions. The first is that, by staking out diametrically opposing positions on this specific issue, the PYD and ISIS have established gender ideology as an important division in the Syrian war. Secondly, the salience of gender ideology has made it an efficient and relatively low-cost means by which participants can signal their position relative to other parties to the conflict. The Jordanian and Emirati governments both publicized the role of female participants in their militaries as a means of emphasizing their opposition to ISIS, while the Syrian regime has done so both to emphasize Alawite distinctiveness (and its role in protecting Alawite and Christian interests) and to bolster its claims of representing a bulwark against ISIS and other radical fundamentalist factions within the FSA. Both policies were relatively low-cost to implement and proved useful for propaganda purposes. The FSA, in contrast, despite some participation by female fighters, has not emphasized their involvement, both because of the wide variety of rebel movements under the FSA umbrella and because its opposition is much more to the Syrian government than to ISIS or the PYD. One additional indication that gendered signaling is being used strategically in Syria is its absence in other contexts. If, for instance, a substantial shift has taken place in the United Arab Emirates in favor of women's increased participation in the military, then we should expect to see the use of female combatants publicized equally in all of the UAE's military campaigns. But this has not been the case. In contrast with its involvement in Syria, the UAE's military operations against the Houthi rebels in Yemen have not featured a highly publicized deployment of female soldiers or media coverage comparable to that which accompanied Major al-Mansouri's participation in the bombing raids against ISIS in Syria. The argument presented here provides a clear explanation: because of the significance of ideologies of gender as a point of cleavage in the Syrian civil war, deploying a female pilot against ISIS carried powerful and politically useful symbolism for the UAE. But in the war in Yemen, differences over ideologies of gender do not represent a significant point of differentiation between the parties, and the use of female combatants therefore does not carry the same symbolic power as it does in the Syrian context. We therefore should not be surprised to see that the UAE has not used the presence of women it its armed forces to emphasize its position in the war in Yemen, as such a signal would not carry the same meaning in the context of the Yemeni civil war as it did in the war in Syria. Within the Syrian war itself, changing alliances and newly adversarial relationships may further alter the utility of gender-signaling for the participants. Turkish-backed factions of the FSA have already come into conflict with the Kurdish forces, taking control of formerly Kurdish-held territory in Afrin. If the Asad regime chooses to attempt to retake these areas, we should perhaps expect its gender-based signaling to vary depending on whether it is in conflict with the YPG and YPJ, or with the various armed opposition factions. In 2017, the Asad regime established all-female local militias in northern Syria that Western media sources have compared explicitly to the YPJ (McKernan 2017). But the long-term postwar consequences are somewhat less clear. The question remains open as to whether the political salience of gender ideology will last after the end of the conflict. For parties to the conflict for whom these ideologies are genuinely held, and for their supporters, they will almost certainly remain significant. What is less clear is whether those who have sought to use these issues in a utilitarian fashion will be able to ignore them after the war is over. Acknowledgements This research was made possible by generous support from the Clark University Faculty Development Fund. I received tremendously helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article at the 2016 International Studies Association annual meeting, and the 2017 ISA pre-conference Workshop on Ideology and Armed Groups. I am also grateful for the comments and encouragement provided by two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors. Footnotes 1 While the larger issue of the status of women under the law in the various Arab states is of course important, it is not the subject of this article and is far too broad an issue to be addressed directly here. 2 Sjoberg has found that women's participation in the Syrian conflict has garnered far more media coverage than most civil wars. She also finds that the agency of the women fighting in the various factions has been interpreted rather unevenly at best (Sjoberg 2018). 3 For further discussion of possible definitions of the term, see Gerring (1997). 4 See Düzgün (2016). For further discussion of this term in Öcalan's own writing, see Öcalan (2013). One of the women's rights activists affiliated with the HDP who was interviewed rejected the term “feminism” because she felt Western feminism focused too much on white, heterosexual women. Therefore, she preferred the term “jineoloji” instead (interview, Activist B). 5 The ways in which they intersect can also be powerful. Posner has found that voters act strategically in choosing which parts of their identities to emphasize in choosing a political party to support (Posner 2007). 6 For discussion of the role of civilian support for insurgent groups, see Mao (1961); Guevara (1961); United States Army and Marine Corps (2007); Weinstein (2006). For analysis of the importance of state sponsorship of militant groups, see Byman (2005); Salehyan (2009, 2010); Szekely (2016). 7 The importance of signaling and credibility (Fearon 1997) and perception and misperception (Jervis 1976), by both democratic (Gaubatz 1996) and authoritarian (Weeks 2008) states, has been well covered by scholars of international relations. But this has been less true of signaling by nonstate actors, with the substantial exception of the literature on terrorism as a form of commitment signaling by militant groups (Pape 2005; Hoffman and McCormick 2010). Because of the multiple cleavages characterizing many civil conflicts, the intersection of ideological positioning and alliance-signaling is particularly important to understand. 8 Hamas recruits women in a number of roles, including as members of its parliamentary delegation and as suicide bombers. Its charter, however, emphasizes the role of women in “guiding and educating the next generation” and warns against cultural influences that might encourage them otherwise (MEMRI 1988, sec. 17). 9 This was even true of the Soviet Union. Despite an official commitment to women's liberation, only two women were ever elected full members of the politburo, and women comprised only 3–4 percent of the central committee, despite the quota of seats reserved for them in the USSR's largely ornamental legislative bodies (Moses 1996, 33–35). 10 Turkey is excluded because its involvement in the war in Syria is impossible to disentangle from its decades-long conflict with the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party) in Turkey, a conflict that is outside the scope of this analysis. In addition, its more direct involvement in the conflict occurred after the point when the research for this article was conducted. Out of an abundance of caution, I have not used the full names of any of those interviewed. 11 This is clear from at least some of the media coverage of the conflict. For instance, see Reuters (2014). 12 This echoes Posner's findings on the crosscutting nature of identity politics and voter behavior in Zambia (Posner 2005). 13 Kurdish identity is largely determined by being Kurdish-speaking, the two largest dialects being Sorani and Kurmanji. Kurds are religiously quite diverse, including Sunnis, Shi'a, Alevis, Jews, and Yazidis. The figure of 10 percent was accurate as of 2012, prior to the massive displacement of Arab Syrians created by the civil war. 14 The Kurdish experience of forced assimilation in Syria is in some ways parallel to that experienced by the Kurdish population of Turkey. 15 Öcalan allowed no challenge to his control over the PKK, and potential rivals were often purged from the organization, leading some former members to refer to it as “Stalinist” (interviews with two former PKK fighters, A.C. and S.C., Hamburg Germany, January 2016). 16 It also allowed the PKK to train in the Palestinian training camps in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa valley in Lebanon. In this sense, Syrian support for the PKK was similar to its support for a range of Palestinian factions, including Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Hamas, which the Asad regime supported despite its suppression of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood culminating in the Hama massacre in 1982. 17 In 2004, an Iranian PKK-affiliated group known as the PJAK (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê or Kurdistan Free Life Party) was founded as well. 18 Hasan and Hiso were elected in September 2017, replacing Salih Muslim and Asya Abdullah. 19 Öcalan's photo is also ubiquitous on PYD websites and social media feeds and was prominently displayed at an event I attended, next to an American flag. 20 See Bookchin (2005, 1987, 1990). 21 Interview, activist M. This is somewhat challenged by Yüksel, who notes that Kemalist feminism, at least, did not do much to address the needs of Kurdish women (Yüksel 2006). 22 Interview, Activist B. 23 Interview, Activist M. 24 Interview, E.K., Kurdish human rights lawyer. This was echoed by Kurdish women's rights activists interviewed in Istanbul. 25 Interview, E.K. 26 This number, while commonly cited in the media, has been contested by some sources. Tezcür, using a database of obituaries published by the PKK, cites a much lower figure of 16 percent (Tezcür 2016). 27 By some accounts, the YPJ was established as a separate entity from the YPG explicitly to overcome the problem of engrained gender hierarchies in mixed military units (De Jong 2016). 28 In at least one of the videos, the women fighters are wearing the yellow insignia of the YPG, rather than the green of the YPJ. This may be a matter of sharing supplies rather than an indicator of lines of command. 29 For instance, see YPJ ROJAVA (2017). 30 Presentation by Ilham Ahmed on the situation in Rojava, Providence, RI, January 15, 2017. 31 Thanks are due to David Patel for this clarification. 32 This echoes Kalyvas’ work on the significance of local cleavages (Kalyvas 2006). 33 One such politician, Mariam Saleh, formally a member of the Change and Reform electoral list and the Islamic Movement, was interviewed by the author in 2009. 34 This is a frequent theme in Asad's speeches. 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TI - Fighting about Women: Ideologies of Gender in the Syrian Civil War
JF - Journal of Global Security Studies
DO - 10.1093/jogss/ogz018
DA - 2020-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/fighting-about-women-ideologies-of-gender-in-the-syrian-civil-war-wIZtMm6SnH
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -