‘…A hint of defiance, a look of liberated joy: that’s the expression etched on the face of this foreign fighter. Ivana Hoffman, 19, did not leave Germany to fight for Islamic State, of course, but for the Kurdish struggle.
In the photograph being widely distributed, she stands in front of the emblematic hammer-and-sickle icon. Hoffman was a communist, fighting to “defend the revolution”, she said. What is being forgotten is that the great war of northern Syria is not simply a defensive struggle against Isis’s barbarism but a revolution in its own right, and the likes of Hoffman are heroes of the left.
[….] In northern Syria, the struggle is led by the Democratic Union party, a radically democratic, feminist, leftwing force and an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ party. Once Stalinist, the PKK has evolved, now drawing inspiration from the libertarian socialism of the US theoretician Murray Bookchin….’
via Why the revolutionary Kurdish fight against Isis deserves our support | Owen Jones | Comment is free | The Guardian.