In December 2024, Bashar al-Assad's government collapsed dramatically, ending the Assad family's 50-year-rule of Syria and the country's 13-year civil war. But guns have not fallen silent over all of Syria. In one corner of the country, Kurdish fighters are still fighting their war -- mostly from underground. Beneath the bombed-out, barren remains of Kobani in northeastern Syria, the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and tunnels of the Kurdish Women’s Protection Unit are a teeming den of activity where sunlight never reaches. Built over many years by these militiawomen, called the YPJ, and their male counterparts, YPG, the vast network of underground tunnels and overground watch towers stretches for miles beneath the ruined warscape of Kobani and touches the border of Turkey, the avowed enemy of these fighters.

The Kurds, who seek to establish a separate state called Kurdistan in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, have been allied with the US in the fight against the Islamic State and the previous Assad regime, but they are deemed terrorist separatists by the Turkish government. Today, Kurdish fighters are still battling the Turkish-backed militia, the Syrian National Army (SNA), and face Turkish airstrikes daily in Kobani. Here is the most dangerous flashpoint of the ongoing Syrian conflict, but it has mostly escaped international attention while all eyes on Damascus and the new regime of former Islamist militant Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. For the Kurdish women fighters, the cold and dark tunnels are a home and shelter while they receive weapons and ideological training -- what they call learning to use "bullets and ideas." For them, the conflict is not just ideological but personal: many saw firsthand the savagery of the Islamic State's fighters who raped, killed and beheaded women, including their friends, during 2014-2019, when the IS controlled this area.

Even today, they fear that al-Jolani, a former ally of the IS, will bring an Islamist-style rule back to Syria and oppose the hard-won freedoms and rights these women enjoy in their enclave, where women can wield authority in the police, in courts and their fighting forces. This project shows the lives of Kurdish women who are at the forefront of the ongoing struggle for Syria -- and what kind of political and social order it will be. I'm the first and only photographer who has ever documented the underground tunnel network in Kobani.