A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State

A secular feminist army courageously challenges the Islamic State

A Road Unforeseen recounts the dramatic, underreported history of the Rojava Kurds, whose all-women militia was instrumental in the perilous mountaintop rescue of tens of thousands of civilians besieged in Iraq. Up to that point, the Islamic State had seemed invincible. Yet these women helped vanquish them, bringing the first half of the refugees to safety within twenty-four hours.

Who are the revolutionary women of Rojava and what lessons can we learn from their heroic story? How does their political philosophy differ from that of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Islamic State, and Turkey? And will the politics of the twenty-first century be shaped by the opposition between these political models?

Meredith Tax (September 18, 1942 – September 25, 2022) was an international women’s rights activist and founding president of Women’s WORLD, a global free speech network of feminist writers, as well as international board chair of the Centre for Secular Space and cofounder of the PEN American Center’s Women’s Committee and International PEN Women Writers’ Committee. She was also a frequent contributor to The Nation and the author of many seminal books, including A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.