Roksana Efrîn-Perwîn Xelîl/JINHA

QAMIŞLO – Women journalists at Rojava's bilingual Ronahî newspaper says their newspaper, which has a gender parity policy, aims to be the voice of all women and to reflect the realities of Rojava.

Ronahî, which started as a weekly newspaper published out of Aleppo in July 2011, now comes out with two issues a week, one in Kurdish and one in Arabic. Ronahî journalists say the newspaper's critical coverage and bilingualism have won it a devoted readership.With theoutbreak of the war in Syria, the newspaper had toleave Aleppo. Ronahî began being published in the three Rojava cantons. Ronahî's Kobanê operations stopped with the outbreak of war in the canton, but the newspaper is preparing to set up an office there as the city is reconstructed.

Ronahî journalist Sîpan Can says that under the Ba'ath regime, a free press was difficult to impossible. "Our newspaper has a lot of goals," she said. "First, we want to create a press tradition." She says that it's thanks to the newspaper's dedicated coverage of popular struggles, from politics to the women's movement to culture, that the circulation has increased. Staff in the Cizîrê canton office tell us they have a canton circulation of 4,000.

Sûhêla Sofî, a columnist for the newspaper, says that readers are attached to Ronahî not just because it comes out with a Kurdish edition, long impossible in Rojava, but for its critical perspective.

"Ronahî is educational for people, and at the same time it brings out a lot of the inadequacies in the [revolutionary] institutions and helps them to be corrected, so the people really love it," said Sûhêla.

Bêrîvan Xelil, of the newspaper administration, explains that Ronahî is pro-woman not just in its coverage, which includes women's issues, but in its internal operations. The administration implements a 50% women quota and ensures that women receive training in all aspects of newspaper operations. She says that under the Ba'ath regime, women had little consciousness of their identities or history.

"But with the news we make and the research we do every day, there's a foundation that's been created," she said. "Women have played an active role in every area during the revolution, especially in the press. As women, we've developed and we'llcontinue to do so."

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