Her War: Kurdish Women Who Fought ISIS, an RT Documentary

Her War - Kurdish Women vs. ISIS (RT Documentary)

Her War: Women vs. ISIS is a 2015 RT documentary about Kurdish women in northern Syria who joined armed self-defence units to fight the Islamic State group. The film follows young fighters of the Women's Protection Units, known by their Kurdish initials YPJ, and lets them explain in their own words why they picked up rifles instead of fleeing. It was made at the height of the war, months after the siege of Kobanî had turned these women into a symbol around the world.

The video that once sat on this page has since been removed from YouTube, so below you will find what the documentary was about, who the women were, what was happening on the ground when it was filmed, and how to watch a state-funded film like this with a critical eye.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

What the documentary shows

The film stays close to the fighters themselves. Most of them are in their late teens or twenties. Some had been students, some had worked at home or on family land, and several describe losing relatives or neighbours to the advance of the Islamic State. Their message is consistent: waiting for someone else to protect their towns had stopped being an option, so they trained, took up positions on the front lines and defended the borders of their own communities.

Alongside the interviews, the crew films daily life in the units: weapons training, guard duty, shared meals, political lessons and the quiet hours between fighting. It is a portrait of a militia that sees itself as both an army and a social movement, where defending territory and changing the place of women in society are presented as one and the same goal.

Who the YPJ are

The Women's Protection Units were founded on 4 April 2013 as an all-female force. They fight alongside the male-led People's Protection Units (YPG), and since 2015 both have been part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the coalition that went on to lead the ground war against the Islamic State in north-eastern Syria.

Membership estimates vary widely, from about 7,000 in 2014 to around 24,000 in 2017, depending on the source and the year. Recruits receive at least a month of military training and also study the political writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed founder of the PKK. One idea from those writings, called jineology, treats the liberation of women as central to the liberation of society as a whole. That is why YPJ fighters often describe their war in two layers: against the Islamic State on the battlefield, and against older patriarchal customs at home.

It is worth knowing that the YPG and YPJ are politically contested. Turkey regards them as an extension of the PKK, which Turkey, the European Union and the United States list as a terrorist organisation, while the US-led coalition worked closely with them as its main partner against the Islamic State. A reader can admire the courage on screen and still keep that wider political picture in view.

Kobanî and Sinjar: the battles behind the film

Two events from 2014 explain why these women became famous. In August 2014, as Islamic State fighters overran the Sinjar region of Iraq, YPG and YPJ units, together with the PKK, helped open a corridor that brought up to 10,000 trapped Yazidis down from Mount Sinjar, supported by US airstrikes. The Yazidis were facing mass killing and enslavement, and the rescue became one of the defining moments of the war.

Weeks later, in mid-September 2014, the Islamic State launched a major offensive on Kobanî, a Kurdish-majority town on the Syrian border with Turkey. By early October it had taken 350 of the 354 surrounding villages and pushed into the city itself, and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled across the border into Turkey. The YPG and YPJ held on street by street, later joined by Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and some Free Syrian Army factions, while US-led airstrikes, which began on 27 September, grew more effective once Kurdish fighters on the ground were passing on targets.

The town was declared cleared on 27 January 2015, though around 70 percent of it lay in ruins. Hundreds of YPG and YPJ fighters died in the battle. Kobanî was widely seen as the first major defeat of the Islamic State on the battlefield, and the images of women commanders and snipers defending it travelled around the world. Her War was filmed in the months that followed.

"Killed by a woman": a claim worth reading carefully

One line repeated in the film's promotion, and in many news reports of the time, is that Islamic State fighters feared female soldiers because they believed that dying at the hands of a woman would deny them paradise. Kurdish fighters themselves often told journalists this, and it clearly mattered to their morale.

It is best read as a widely reported belief rather than an established fact. It is not a recognised teaching of mainstream Islam, and there is no reliable way to know how many Islamic State fighters actually held it. What can be said with confidence is that the idea became part of the YPJ's public image and a source of pride for the women who repeated it.

Watching an RT documentary with care

The film was produced by RT, the television network funded by the Russian government. It launched in 2005 as Russia Today, rebranded as RT in 2009, and runs a separate documentary channel that started in 2011. RT has been described as a propaganda outlet by critics including Andrey Illarionov, a former adviser to Vladimir Putin, and the European Union banned it from broadcasting in member states in March 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

That does not make the women's testimony false. Their faces, their stories and the conditions they describe are consistent with reporting from many independent outlets. But a viewer should ask what the producer chose to emphasise, which voices are missing, and how the film fits Russia's own interests in Syria, where Moscow backed the government of Bashar al-Assad. A few practical habits help:

Notice who funds a documentary and check whether independent outlets tell the same story.
Separate first-hand testimony, which is valuable, from the narration and editing that frame it.
Look for what happened after filming, since documentaries capture a single moment in a long conflict.

What happened next

After Kobanî, the Syrian Democratic Forces, with the YPJ inside them, pushed the Islamic State back across north-eastern Syria, including the long campaign for Raqqa, the group's self-declared capital. The last pocket of its territory in Syria, at Baghuz in Deir ez-Zor province, fell on 23 March 2019, after which the Islamic State turned to insurgency rather than holding land.

The YPJ also drew foreign volunteers. Anna Campbell, from Britain, became the first British woman to die fighting with the unit, killed in Afrin in 2018 during a Turkish-led offensive. Ten years after Her War, the region's future remains uncertain, but the women in the film left a lasting mark on how the world imagines who fights, and why.

If you want to go further, the stories of the Yazidis and other minorities targeted by the Islamic State, and of the heritage the group destroyed, are covered in the related articles below.

Sources: Documentary by RT (Russia Today); Wikipedia: Women's Protection Units; Wikipedia: Siege of Kobanî; Wikipedia: Battle of Baghuz Fawqani; Wikipedia: RT (TV network).

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