
Female Fighters of Kurdistan
Kurdish guerrilla movements in the mountains bordering Iran and Turkey have built their fighting forces around a policy of strict gender equality, a legacy that traces back to the female Peshmerga of the 1970s and 80s. VICE correspondent Thomas Morton travels to an outpost run by PJAK, the Free Life for Kurdistan party and the youngest of the region's militant groups, to see that policy in practice. He meets women serving in command roles, cooking duty, and as snipers on the front line, alongside male comrades in a three-part series shot on location near the Iranian border. Morton also sketches the tangle of groups pursuing a Greater Kurdistan across Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, including the PKK and the KCK, each with its own tactics but overlapping personnel and a shared goal. The film treats PJAK's fighters as a test case for whether the decades-old promise of equality inside these movements actually holds up in daily camp life.