Bêrîtan Elyakut/JINHA

KOBANÊ – YPJ fighter Viyan Amara, who lost her life defending the Rojava revolution in 2013, became an early icon of women's resistance against Daesh attacks on the Rojava revolution. Her parents spoke about Viyan's childhood, saying that she had an adult sense of justice from an early age.

Understanding Viyan's struggle to defend the Rojava revolution, for which she gave her life in a battle with Daesh in the village of Kendal near Girê Spî, is not hard to understand given her own experience of state oppression. She was born in 1983 in Van, after her family was forced by state attacks to leave their village.

Viyan, born Sevim Kaya, was still in the fifth grade when she decided that she wanted to join the PKK one day and take, as her nom de guerre, that of the Kurdish women's liberation fighter Viyan Soran.

When she grew up, Sevim spent many years in the PKK. Then, in the first days of the Rojava revolution, she headed to Kobanê to be a Kurdish teacher, before the Daesh attacks on the city. She joined the resistance to defend the revolution.

"Sevim was different from her brothers and sisters. She loved people, children, nature, animals," said Halime, Sevim's mother. She was a smart child, who teachers moved forward a grade in school and who finished the Qur'an course her family sent her to in one month.

Halime described Sevim as a child who, if she found that someone had hit her brother or sister, would immediately go to take "revenge"—despite her mother's, teachers' and school principle's frequent requests that she stop. "If she put her mind to something, she did it," said Halime. She behaved like an adult at a young age.

When Sevim eventually joined the PKK, said her father, the family didn't hear from her for over five years. One day, the family traveled to the Maxmur refugee camp, in Southern Kurdistan, to investigate reports related to the death of another loved one in the war. Her father Cemil, hearing that Sevim was in the nearby Kandil Mountain base of the PKK, traveled there to see her.

"When I got there, seeing her standing there straight upright made me so happy," he said. "To see Sevim happy there was enough for me." He said that he was proud of his daughter for what she did.

Sevim's brother Ayhan said that his strongest memory of Sevim was of the moments when she would defend him and her other siblings. He remembered the day when, after many years without seeing Sevim, he got a telephone call from her—which was how the family learned she had traveled to Rojava.

"When I heard her voice, I got excited and couldn't speak for a moment," he said. "She said 'I'm close to you all now,' but she wouldn't say where she was. I kept insisting that I see her. Then her friend took the phone and told us they were in Kobanê. The last thing she said to me was, 'brother, you're not going to see me. I'm going to be a martyr."

Ayhan said that one day, Sevim accidentally called his number and they spoke briefly, for five minutes. The next day, the family learned that she had died.

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