QAMISHLI, Syria — Fawza al-Yusuf, a Syrian Kurd from a modest family, left northern Syria as a teenager and student in 1991, fearful of arrest for her political activities. She joined the uprising that broke out in the Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey in 1977 and remains ongoing, calling herself Zakho Zaghrous after Zakho, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Mount Zaghrous, which dominates the mountain range between the Iranian- and Iraqi-ruled Kurdish regions.

Yusuf's family was like many others in Rojava, as Kurds call Syrian Kurdistan. She and her three sisters all joined the Kurdish uprising in Turkey, considering it the only way to stand up to the oppression they faced. Fawza’s older sister, Roza, who took the name of another Kurdistan mountain, Joodi, as her nom de guerre, was killed during the Iraqi-Kurdish civil war in 1995.

After 10 years of fighting Turkish forces in the mountains, in 2011 Yusuf returned to northern Syria, with its social fabric of Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians. She is now a leader and sits on the board of the Democratic Federal System for Rojava-Northern Syria, the democratic autonomous administration overseeing predominately Kurdish areas in northern and northeastern Syria.

Yusuf sat for an interview with Al-Monitor Dec. 16 at her office in Qamishli.