Turkish Armed Forces seeks female fighters
The Turkish military is set to recruit 8,000 women in an effort to bolster its image and defang Kurdish militias' association with female empowerment.
The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been fighting the Turkish army initially for independence and later for Kurdish self-rule inside Turkey for the past 33 years. One of the hallmarks of the group is that it has succeeded in prizing away thousands of women from the clutches of patriarchy and into the battlefield.
Now the Turkish army, it seems, is preparing to respond in kind.
The Turkish Gendarmerie Command has announced that it will recruit 8,000 women whose duties will include combating terrorism, which is shorthand for fighting the PKK, and defending the country’s borders. Ladies who are older than 26, shorter than 1 meter 64 centimeters or have a criminal record need not apply.
The move is set to dramatically boost the share of women in the gendarmerie forces from its current 1% to 10%, and within the Turkish Armed Forces as a whole. As of 2013, the last year of official data, there were only 1,345 female commissioned officers and 370 noncommissioned ones out of a total of 723,741 military personnel in Turkey.
