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The whole world is impacted by the crisis in the Middle East. Almost all countries are nervous about the possibility of some of their citizens joining the Islamic State, or ISIS. Other countries are facing a huge humanitarian crisis with refugees wanting to leave the crisis-torn areas and settle in Europe and the US. That refugee question is itself tearing apart the fabric of European and US societies. People want to help refugees, but not at the cost of potentially risking homegrown terrorism.

Given this background, it was fascinating to read about what’s happening in Rojava. Rojava is sandwiched between Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The area is now controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is led by Abdullah Ocalan. The PKK was previously a violent Maoist organisation but for more than 10 years it has had a change in direction under the guidance of Ocalan, who is in a solitary prison on a Turkish island surrounded by 1,000 guards. While in prison, Ocalan read Murray Bookchin’s book called The Ecology of Freedom. The ideas in the book argued that all environmental problems stemmed from social issues like racism, sexism and inequality, and called for a more direct form of governance called municipal assemblies.

Enthralled by Bookchin’s ideas, he made The Ecology of Freedom required reading for all PKK commanders. When the Syrian war broke out, the PKK embraced ideas from Bookchin to fight and govern in the areas they controlled, which is primarily Rojava.

Here’s a story about the governance structure in Rojava shared in The New York Times article.

Ocalan instructed his followers to stop attacking the government and instead create municipal assemblies, which he called ‘‘democracy without the state.’’ These assemblies would form a grand confederation that would extend across all Kurdish regions of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran and would be united by a common set of values based on defending the environment; respecting religious, political and cultural pluralism; and self-defense. He insisted that women be made equal leaders at all levels of society. ‘‘The worldview for which I stand,’’ Ocalan told his lawyers privately, ‘‘is very close to that of Bookchin.’’

‘‘Rojava is something beyond the nation-state,’’ said Hediye Yusuf, co-president of Jazeera canton, the local municipality of which Qamishli is part. ‘‘It’s a place where all people, all minorities and all genders are equally represented.’’

Every position at every level of government in Rojava, she said, includes a female equivalent of equal authority. Just as Yusuf was co-governor of Jazeera, Salih Muslim, the chairman of the P.Y.D., had a female counterpart, a woman named Asya Abdullah.

To ensure that a Kurdish majority doesn’t dominate, Salih claims the P.Y.D. has implemented checks on its own power. ‘‘As a repressed minority in Turkey,’’ she said, ‘‘we know the importance of giving everyone an equal role in government.’’ On March 13, canton wide elections were held in Jazeera. Out of 565 candidates, there were 237 women, 39 Assyrians and 28 Arabs, from a multitude of political parties. 

And here’s another one in Financial Times.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the democratic experiment in Rojava is the justice system that has been established alongside self-government. In Jazira, one chair of the justice committee (again a young woman) explained that since courts and punishment represented the coercive dominance of the state, such institutions had been replaced by a kind of community justice, where “social peace”, and not punishment, was the objective. Intrigued, though a little baffled by these slogans, I asked to see what this meant in practice. The next day, I attended a mass lunch where one family hosted another. A member of the first family had killed a man from the second: lunch marked the families’ reconciliation, the culmination of a collective process of compensation, apology and forgiveness, where the perpetrator, briefly imprisoned, publicly acknowledged his crime. In turn, this act of contrition, supported by his family by means including the ceremonial meal, was accepted by the victim’s relations.

A key element supporting the governance structure of Rojava are the fighting units called YPG and YPJ, which is the female fighting unit of the YPG. Images of women fighters of YPJ on Zanmel show an amazing collage of determined women taking an oversized enemy with good spirit. Here is a story of Mirza and how the YPJ rescued his family and village in the NYT article mentioned above.

Mirza grew up outside Syria in a small village in western Iraq. He is not a Muslim or an atheist but a Yazidi, part of an ethnic and religious minority that practices a modern form of Zoroastrianism. He hadn’t heard of Abdullah Ocalan until recently. In August 2014, ISIS extremists attacked his village, near the city of Sinjar, and butchered as many as 5,000 of his neighbors. While Mirza and his family were trapped on a mountain for four days, waiting to die, a battalion of women — Y.P.J. soldiers — fought through the ISIS lines and created a path for them to escape. Mirza, severely dehydrated and on the verge of collapse, fled.

‘‘The battle made me think of women differently,’’ he told me. ‘‘Women fighters — they saved us. My society, Yazidi society, is more, let’s say, traditional. I’d never thought of women as leaders, as heroes, before.’’

Despite this really progressive approach, Rojavo faces hardship as explained by the Financial Times:

Turkey has closed its borders with Rojava, preventing all movement from the north, including humanitarian supplies to Kurdish-controlled areas. To the south, in Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government does not make access easy; permits for journalists are not straightforward and, we were told, repeat visits are discouraged. The isolation is not only physical. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurd YPG militia that is fighting the jihadi organisation Isis in Rojava as synonymous with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a longstanding enemy inside Turkey. The YPG’s advance against Isis along Syria’s northern border has been halted by the declaration by Turkey of a so-called “safe zone” to the west of the Euphrates between the front line and the Kurdish-controlled canton of Afrin in the north-west. For the Kurds, the motive seems transparently clear: to prevent the formation of a contiguous area of Kurdish control along Turkey’s southern border.

Notwithstanding the geo-political considerations of the area, the world needs such a government structure to succeed in the Middle East so that it becomes an example for its neighbours. Rojavo could also become an oasis for war-torn refugees in nearby areas.