VANCOUVER — The city was out enjoying an overcast Saturday afternoon of grocery shopping on Davie Street, biking the Stanley Park Seawall and just staring at the freighters out in English Bay. But Hanna Bohman was thinking about leaving town.

It had been almost two months since she’d said goodbye to Syria, where she volunteered with the Kurdish women’s army known as the YPJ. And she was wondering: should she go back? “I’m thinking about it,” she said in an interview at a West End coffee shop. “I’m thinking about it a lot.”

Pulling her back to the war zone were the “girls” — the female Kurdish guerillas she befriended during her months in Rojava, the independent state they are fighting to establish in northern Syria.

Girls like Heval Rosa.

In a video on Bohman’s tablet, Rosa sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck holding her grenade launcher. “She likes heavy metal,” recalled Bohman. “She asked me, ‘Do you have any heavy metal?’” Seeing the camera trained on her, Rosa stuck out her tongue.

Another video showed half-a-dozen women in camouflage sitting on a floor mat in an abandoned house playing a game, laughing like it was a sleepover. And then there was the video of the uniformed YPJ fighter who insisted that Bohman take her jacket because there was a cold wind.

The conflict in Syria has been hard on women. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has systematically raped them, sold them, traded them and enslaved them. Women have been forced to convert and cover themselves. They’ve been lured from Western countries to serve as comfort wives for lonely killers. But as Bohman found out, the women are fighting back.

The Women’s Defense Unit, or YPJ, was created three years ago and consists of some 7,500 Kurdish fighters. It is the women’s branch of a militia called the YPG, or People’s Protection Units. By decree, 40% of the spots in each YPG fighting unit are filled by women.

“The women fight just as much as the men,” said Bohman, 46, who is also known by her online alias, Tiger Sun. “I think the YPJ girls, they’re the real heroes because they’re not just fighting ISIL, they’re fighting for women’s rights.”

One of a handful of Canadians who have fought alongside Kurdish forces, Bohman was born in Zambia to Canadian parents. She returned to Canada when she was still a toddler and grew up with humanitarian ambitions, dreaming of flying aid missions in Africa.

Instead she worked a variety of jobs — sales, the oil fields, a horseracing track — until a workplace injury followed by a car accident made her rethink what she really wanted. “I realized I’d been spending too much of my time doing things I didn’t want to do,” she said.

She didn’t know much about the Kurdish people but she was familiar with ISIL and she thought, if Canadians were fighting for the extremist cause, why couldn’t she fight for the other side? After making contact with the YPJ through Facebook, she broke the news to her family. “I told my mother and a couple of friends,” she said. “I was really excited to get going.”

But as she was leaving Qatar, next stop northern Iraq, she got nervous. She was trusting her life to people she didn’t know, at a time jihadists had discovered the profitability and shock value of kidnapping. The plane landed in Sulaymaniyah and she crossed a river at night to a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) camp. The setting reminded her of B.C.’s Okanagan. Nine other Westerners were there — from Germany, the Netherlands and the United States.

She had been told there would be 45 days of training, but by the time she got there they had reduced it to 15 days, and then five. It ended up consisting of five hours of firearms instruction, “everything I could have learned on YouTube,” she said.

Initially, she was assigned to a base where she dug ditches and took shifts on guard duty. The Shingal Mountains of Iraq were just across the border and the biggest threat was ISIL suicide trucks. From there, she moved closer to the action, joining a mobile fighting unit. They would capture a village, hold it and move on. “Most of the time (ISIL) would run away but sometimes they’d put up a fight and we’d just kill them off,” she said. Bohman said she never killed anyone herself.

The YPJ girls she met were young — 17, 18 and 19. Many were poorly educated, some had run away from forced marriages. She described them as a “peasant militia.” During downtime, they played volleyball, danced and sang nationalistic songs, she said. They seemed keenly aware they were fighting for women’s rights.

“As we say, the revolution of Rojava is a women’s revolution,” Feleknas Uca, a Turkish Member of Parliament who is also Kurdish and Yazidi, said in an interview at the Toronto Kurdish Community Centre. She said the YPJ was avenging ISIL’s treatment of women and joked that ISIL fighters were terrified of the sight of red shoes and makeup. “They are very afraid of women because they believe if they die by women they will not go to heaven.”

In contrast to ISIL’s misogyny the YPJ manifesto speaks optimistically about “gender freedom” and “struggling at all levels with an awareness of the idea of legitimate defense in the face of various forms of attacks against women.”

In June, Bohman rode with the Kurdish fighters as they captured the town of Tal Abyad. She was crossing a damaged bridge when she jumped and her legs buckled. She had lost so much muscle eating a diet of canned sardines and cucumber, she knew it was time to go home. “I didn’t want anyone getting hurt because I couldn’t carry my weight,” she said. “It was the safest thing for everybody.”

Nobody batted an eye when she got to Montreal airport, she said. “All they said to me was welcome home.” Two weeks later, however, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer tracked her down and they met for lunch, she said.

“I asked her why it took them so long to contact me and she said, ‘Well, we didn’t know you went,’” Bohman said. The CSIS officer did not seem concerned about Bohman’s encounters with the PKK. She only seemed interested in Canadians who had joined ISIL, Bohman said. “She wasn’t worried about me.”

The Kurdish conflict has worsened since she left. A ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK collapsed and there have been several deadly skirmishes. Last month, a suspected ISIL suicide bomber killed 32 youths in Suruc, a Kurdish town in Turkey.

Bohman put her uniform back on for an Aug. 6 protest at the U.S. consulate in Vancouver after Turkey launched airstrikes on some of the PKK camps she had visited in Iraq. But she was undecided about going back to Syria.

A new travel zone ban proposed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper may complicate matters. Although those fighting against ISIL are said to be exempted, it was unclear how the law would impact those like Bohman who rubbed shoulders with the PKK, a terrorist group under Canadian law.

“Should Sun be motivated enough by the Turkish offensive against the Kurds to return to fight with the YPG, she could suddenly find herself on the other side of Harper’s proposed travel ban law,” journalist and former infantryman Scott Taylor wrote in Esprit de Corps.

Bohman was well-aware of the problems she could face should she return. “What am I going to do that’s going to make me feel as useful and worthwhile?” she asked. “I’m not doing anything better here in Canada.”

National Post

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