Arriving in North-East Syria means searching; it means asking questions. Beneath the light of a brilliant full moon, I find myself asking the hevals—the comrades—new questions, old questions, existential, philosophical, and practical ones. What shape do I want to give to our existence? What does it mean to be young and struggle against war? How do we prepare ourselves for the reality of war? How can we become bearers of peace? What is love?
Every day I ask myself how to break free from the chaos that the system continually reproduces. How can we remain grounded, full of energy that can be directed toward a purpose, without losing ourselves in superficiality?
Education is the space and the time in which we reflect, dig deeper, and understand what form and substance we want to give our lives. Here in North-East Syria, everyone takes part in education. Society, in every sphere of life, participates in educational processes—moments of collective life devoted to finding solutions to the questions of existence. There are educational programs, both short and long, for young people, for neighborhood and village communes, for women, and for those involved in the work of society—for example, in cooperatives, the healthcare system, and self-defense.
Education is the foundation of communal life because its purpose is to become—and to be—a society, civakbûn.
In Kurdish, perwerde means education. Literally, it means “to give wings.” Education allows us to take flight, like hawks learning to soar, changing perspective, broadening it, moving swiftly and traveling far, able to connect different places and realities.
To educate oneself means to create meaning. Here we learn not to take anything for granted, but to appreciate both the smallest and the greatest gestures. Everything has value: the meal lovingly prepared by a family that welcomes you into their home, a warm glass of çay, a criticism meant to encourage me to grow and reflect, or the sincere smile of someone meeting you for the very first time.
I grew up experiencing education through the school system. As a child, I was excited to go to school: I loved studying, I was curious, and I wanted to learn as much as possible alongside the other children. I read countless books, wrote short stories, learned history in creative ways, and discovered biology by going to the park and having people explain to me how life and nature worked.
But over the years, that enthusiasm gradually faded.
School and university came to mean stress and deadlines. The education system is built on information, grades, and merit. For several years, I measured my worth and my abilities through the grades I received.
The curiosity of my younger self was swallowed up—it was consumed by the system. Learning without love or passion is a contradiction.
It became difficult to dig deeper, to connect myself with what I was studying. Above all, learning no longer had a transformative purpose or a direction toward freedom. Its purpose was to reproduce the very system that had created it.
The school system shapes the way we think—or fail to think. Subjects are taught separately, disconnected from one another. In this way, we are trained to think in standardized compartments rather than to build meaningful connections.
In schools and universities, the mentality of war continues to grow: through rigid and regulatory approaches to education, the presence of state militarist forces in schools, and the alliance between the arms industry and academia, where knowledge is increasingly subordinated to military needs, such as the development of new weapons.
How can we break this cycle? How can we restore dignity to knowledge?
Knowledge cannot be a form of power. It must be shared, social, and collective. Whatever I come to understand should become a gift to society as a whole. It should serve to transform reality for the better, to question what exists, and to create new possibilities.
For the Kurdish liberation movement, however, education means education for life. It means learning how to think again—rebuilding a way of thinking that connects history with the present, analytical intelligence with emotional intelligence, and different fields of knowledge with one another instead of isolating and compartmentalizing thought.
What does it mean to live? What are the values of life?
Education is not understood merely as studying or developing analytical intelligence. Here, people learn how to live: how to see reality and themselves more clearly; how to understand and organize their emotions and thoughts; how to become more generous and selfless; how to respond to the needs of everyone; and how to find solutions to problems. One learns to break free from egocentrism and place the commune at the center.
One comrade once said, “If I’d live an ordinary life, I would be afraid of death.” A life without values, dreams, or hope for a democratic society is nothing more than survival.
Learning to live means filling our existence with meaning. Kemal Pir, one of the founding comrades of the PKK, said: “We love life so much that we are ready to die for it.”
When understanding becomes deep and firmly rooted, fear and uncertainty grow smaller.
But first we must understand what we are defending—and what we are fighting for.
The ongoing war affects every part of the world through different means. Here in the Middle East we witness its escalation every day: genocide, bombings, ethnic cleansing, physical and psychological attacks. Yet elsewhere the system wages war in other ways, above all by distorting meaning. It is a dirty, insidious war. We are made to believe we are free, while in reality we are living in a society under attack.
Often, we ourselves refuse—or fail—to recognize that we are at war, that the system is stripping away our clarity, our ethics, and our sense of community. We retreat from the complexity of reality into our comfort zones because war frightens us, immobilizes us, and leaves us paralyzed.
Settling for comfort means remaining on the surface, living selfishly, asking no questions, and becoming blind to a world that is collapsing in on itself.
What role do we want to play in this war? What is our responsibility?
Education is precisely our form of self-defense.
We must defend the historical memory of society: the women who created life around them, the communal experiences that have sustained people. History is what protects us. It is also where we find inspiration. Now it is our turn to continue the journey.
Here, education is based on discussion, reflection, and understanding. One of its aims is to cultivate knowledge: to know ourselves through history and society, and vice versa; to rediscover love for nature; to rediscover ourselves at the beginning of history by returning to our roots.
Reber Apo (Abdullah Öcalan) says that to know oneself is to know the universe. The purpose of the universe is the search for freedom, and we too are engaged in that continuous search. The universe is in constant transformation, yet something always endures and remains.
As individuals and as a society, what do we need to transform? And what do we want to preserve?
We can draw a map that reveals the true contours and deepest roots of our personalities. We need to develop ourselves and society through the perspective of the free woman. We must ask ourselves what love for the earth, nature, and the universe truly means; what it means to develop a way of thinking free from the system’s influence, enabling us to make decisions according to our own will; what struggle, beauty, and ethics really are. These are all necessary steps.
We, too, as young internationalists, take part in these educational processes. What I have learned is that here we do not run away from our contradictions or from life’s great questions. Instead, they become opportunities to change perspective and confront them.
Periods of education make this possible. Time is carefully structured, there is order, and this creates countless opportunities to delve deeply into things. There is a time for everything. Concentration comes more naturally, as does the connection with one’s own thoughts and feelings.
The liberal and capitalist chaos is not reproduced here. Instead, people live the alternative, embodying it in every activity. We are living through a revolution, and here everything is a struggle.
For me, education is an immense challenge, like climbing a high mountain. It means going beyond one’s own limits, cultivating curiosity, depth, and wonder toward the past, the present, and the future. I have just finished a period of education that helped me reflect deeply, because I want to understand what it means to be a communal woman, a revolutionary woman, a young woman who breaks with the system.
In Kurdish, xwebûn means “being oneself.” It means reconnecting with the culture of the Mother Goddess that I can rediscover within myself. It means creating from absence, protecting beauty, spreading new knowledge, and making the world around us more beautiful through effort. It also means being genuine and developing a strong and courageous personality.
Returning to myself means becoming communalist—seeing myself as part of a larger living body made up of many different people and colors.
Education means asking countless questions and accepting that we do not already have all the answers in our pockets. It means cultivating patience while, at the same time, struggling as though there were no tomorrow. And it means always nurturing the determination to seek answers while continuing to formulate new questions.
I hope that all youth can create their own education systems, responding to their needs and shortcomings while expanding both their discussions and their hopes.
“The more organized you are, the more you exist.” These are the words of Reber Apo. As a young person, I need to organize myself: my time, my experiences, and my feelings. But I also have the responsibility to help organize those around me—to organize thousands of women, children, elders, and young people. To organize means to give direction and meaning to our existence. Especially because now is the time to take our dreams seriously. and is important to keep walking in search of them through education.
Seeking
We seek peace
in the roots of the oak—
deep, reaching far
into the earth,
where they find water:
the source of life,
quenching the thirst
of those who have lost hope.
We seek love,
the first principle of the universe,
the force that sets all dialogue in motion,
binding souls together,
weaving harmony through unseen connections,
through the silent language of living energies.
We seek woman—
the curious being who radiates light.
How can she still remain in darkness?
She carries the memory of ancient worlds,
and knows how to bring forth life
even from death.
We seek knowledge
to rediscover within ourselves
the strength to resist emptiness;
to breathe ethics into times of change,
and to raise our voices
for renewal, dignity, and rebirth.
Cercare
Cerchiamo la pace
Nella radice della quercia
che è profonda e va lontano
fino al sotto suolo
e incontra acqua
che è vita
e asseta i senza speranza
Cerchiamo l’amore
che è il principio dell’universo
Motore della dialettica
collega e cuce le anime
armonia nelle connessioni metafisiche
nelle comunicazioni tra energie
Cerchiamo la donna
L’umano curioso che emana luce
Come può rimanere ancora al buio?
Ancora conserva memorie antiche
E crea la vita anche dalla morte
Cerchiamo la conoscenza
per ritrovare in noi
la lotta contro il vuoto
Respiri di etica nel cambiamento
E grida di riscatto nella rigenerazione.