Zelal Zagros, fighting for the freedom of women and the Kurdish people

Firyal Silêman Xalid fought for the freedom of women and the Kurdish people for over three decades under the name Zelal Zagros. Her murder in Kirkuk will not stop the Kurdish women's liberation struggle.

The Turkish state is systematically carrying out attacks on Kurdish revolutionaries. Most recently, Firyal Silêman Xalid was shot dead on the street in front of a school in Kirkuk on Thursday. The Kurdish woman, born in Amûdê in 1975, called herself Zelal Zagros within the liberation movement and fought for the freedom of women and her people for over three decades.

She got to know the Kurdish movement in Rojava in the early 1990s. She was a guerrilla in the mountains for 15 years and then worked in Kurdish society in Armenia for eight years. During the Rojava Revolution, she returned to the region of her birth to take part in building grassroots democratic structures.

In Tirbespiyê, she contributed her experience to the establishment of municipalities and councils and contributed to strengthening equal relations between the Kurdish, Arab and Christian population groups.

When ISIS invaded northern Syria, she was one of the brave women who took up arms against the Islamists. After the liberation of Manbij in 2016, she campaigned for the emergence of civil self-government, in which all parts of the multi-ethnic population mosaic are still involved today.

She arrived in Deir ez-Zor at the beginning of 2018 and continued her commitment to the fraternity of peoples under difficult and dangerous conditions. She then worked in Damascus to organize the Kurds living there and to build connections with other women's movements. She placed particular emphasis on educational work with Arabs and all women in Syria.

Most recently she was in South Kurdistan for the women's movement, where she was murdered on 18 January. The attack in Kirkuk was another attempt to suppress the Kurdish women's liberation struggle by all means. Zelal Zagros was also a comrade of Evîn Goyî (Emine Kara), who was shot dead in Paris on 23 December 2022.

The Kurdistan Women's Community (KJK) said in a statement that since the assassination of Sakine Cansız (Sara), Fidan Doğan (Rojbîn) and Leyla Şaylemez (Ronahî) on 9 January 2013 in Paris in North, South and West Kurdistan, dozens of Kurdish women revolutionaries, politicians and activists have been murdered. The statement said: “The Turkish state is acting like a network of murderers in order to weaken the level of struggle achieved by Kurdish women. It assumes that it can dissuade women and Kurds from fighting for freedom and resistance through massacres. However, Kurdish women's resistance practices over the past five decades show that this is a big mistake. Every massacre and every attack have strengthened the will of Kurdish women and strengthened their determination to maintain their place in the ranks of the revolutionary struggle.”