Jo Magpie. All rights reserved.Sometime in early February, I was excited to receive an invitation to participate in a women's delegation to Rojava, the de-facto autonomous Kurdish majority region in northern Syria. The delegation was open to women journalists, activists and lawyers, and would be timed to coincide with International Women's Day.
I arranged to go with two people I hadn't met before: Ali, a friend of a friend, and Kimmie who I had interviewed over Skype for my book about female hitchhikers. She had already hitchhiked all around West Africa solo and had been blogging about Kurdish and Middle-Eastern issues recently, so she seemed like a good candidate for an adventure. None of us had any idea what to expect, not really. But we are all very open, flexible, and up for a challenge.
We needed that determination and flexibility to cross the border from the KRG – the Kurdish Regional Government in the north of Iraq – to Rojava. We had been informed that the border was “in the personal hands of” Massoud Barzani, the Prime Minister, and that we would need to get permission.
