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VOICE

How Malala Can Help Defeat the Islamic State 

Empowering Muslim women is the key to degrading and ultimately destroying

medieval and reactionary fanaticism.

 

BY DAVID ROTHKOPF 

 

OCTOBER 13, 2014

The Nobel Peace Prize committee rightly cited the work that Malala Yousafzai and

Kailash Satyarthi did to lead the "struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education," but it was Malala's work

on behalf of girls and women that may be even more central and important to

advancing peace in the world today. As I have written before, the systematicrepression of women is history's greatest injustice and one that must be addressed

before any era can rightfully call itself just or modern. But beyond this core concern,in a world in which one of the greatest international threats comes from the spreadof Islamist extremist groups, it is urgent that we also realize how essential

empowering women is to defeating jihadists.

The correlation between the repression of women's rights and instability in themodern world is absolutely clear. Each year, the World Economic Forum produces

a Global Gender Gap report. In 2013, it tracked 136 countries on the education,economic empowerment, health, and political empowerment of women. Consider theworld's hot spots for extremism. Some, like Somalia, Libya, and Afghanistan, don't

even make the list. But of those that do, Nigeria ranks 106, Bahrain is 112, Qatar is115, Kuwait is 116, Jordan is 119, Turkey is 120, Algeria is 124, Egypt is 125, Saudi

Arabia is 127, Mali is 128, Morocco is 129, Iran is 130, Syria is 133, Pakistan is 135,

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the Turkish business and educational communities that demonstrate that women's

empowerment is a rising tide well worth harnessing.

In some communities in the Middle East in the midst of these crises, strong currents

of change are afoot. In 2003, Shirin Ebadi of Iran won the Nobel Peace Prize inspecific recognition of her work for women. In 2011, Yemen's Tawakkol Karman,

(along with Liberia's Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Leymah Gbowee) was similarly honored.Today, other symbols of these emerging models of greater tolerance andempowerment are now seen joining Malala on the front lines of the battle with

extremists. Maj. Mariam al-Mansouri, 35, of the United Arab Emirates led Emirati

Air Force F-16s in the initial wave of strikes against the Islamic State and, it wasannounced, would lead future missions as well. And in some of the most inspiring

stories of the battle against extremists in Syria and Iraq, Kurdish Peshmerga units

often composed largely of women have fought bravely and successful against the

Islamic State and other militants.

In one September story on ForeignPolicy.com titled "Meet the Badass WomenFighting the Islamic State," one of those fighters was profiled in a story by

Mohammed A. Salih. Her nom de guerre is Avesta. She was identified as commanding

"a group of 13 fighters, eight of them female, from the Kurdistan Workers' Party(PKK) -- a rebel group that has fought the Turkish state for three decades in pursuit

of Kurdish rights." Coolly, she assessed the threat posed by the jihadists by saying,

"The Islamic State fought rigorously. But it was not as severe as our previous fightswith the Turkish army.... The Turks have warplanes and air power." Tragically, the day

after the story ran here at FP, we were forced to include the following update:

Avesta was killed on Sept. 12. According to a spokesperson for the PKK guerrillas innorthern Iraq, she was leading a unit in a joint PKK-Peshmerga operation to retake a

village near Makhmour when a bullet fired by an Islamic State militant struck her in

the neck. She was put in a Peshmerga Humvee headed for the hospital in Makhmourthat was struck by an improvised explosive device. She died soon after.

But Avesta was by no means alone. According to Syria Deeply , almost a third of the

fighters in the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (in Kurdish, the PartiyaYekitiya Demokrat, or PYD) are women. Kurdish women have been fighting the Turks

for decades and have developed a particular appetite for the fight against jihadistsgiven the latter's extraordinarily oppressive attitudes toward women. One suchsoldier wasquoted by PBS as saying: "I believe in a greater cause, which is protecting

our families and our cities from the extremists' brutality and dark ideas.... Theydon't accept having women in leadership positions. They want us to cover ourselves

and become housewives to attend to their needs only. They think we have no right to

talk and control our lives."

But the stories of Malala, Mariam al-Mansouri, and Avesta are aberrations in a

world in which women's roles are still deeply circumscribed.

But the stories of Malala, Mariam al-Mansouri, and Avesta are aberrations in a worldin which women's roles are still deeply circumscribed. It would be a mistake to

suggest that the current fight is one between pro-woman vs. anti-woman forces, given

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Empowering women undoes centuries of injustice and enriches societies. But it also

can play a vital role in helping to defeat some of the most dangerous ideologies and

organizations found anywhere on the Earth today. It is for this reason that those

groups are so scared by a teenage girl like Malala or by the progress represented bythe likes the women currently fighting extremism in the Middle East. They represent

the kind of change that can permanently relegate the medieval philosophies andpractices of groups like the Islamic State to the ash heap of history where theybelong.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images