Hediya Yousef
| Hediya Yousef | |
|---|---|
| Co-president of the Federation of Northern Syria - Rojava | |
|
Assumed office March 2016 Serving with Mansur Selum |
|
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1954 |
| Nationality | Syrian Kurd |
| Political party | |
| Occupation | Politician |
Hediya Yousef is a Syrian-Kurdish ex-guerilla and politician with the Northern Syria Federation. Since March 2016, she holds the office of co-chairperson of the executive committee of the Rojava. Yousef is an ethnic Kurd, and serves with fellow co-chairperson Riad Darar, an ethnic Arab.
In her twenties, Yousef, then a guerilla, had been imprisoned by the Assad government for two years in Damascus on charges of having been a member of a secret organization aiming to break up Syria.
Yousef first held the office of co-president of Jazeera Canton in the northeast of the newly established Rojava federation. Yousef served as co-president with fellow co-president Humeydi Daham al-Hadi, an Arab tribal leader. Yousef's office was located in the former headquarters of the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Company in the oil-rich city of Rmeilan, the city where the Rojava federation had been declared.
During her tenure as co-president, Yousef worked towards greater inter-sectarian cooperation particularly between Kurds and Arabs. The Rojava federation, Yousef said, "is something beyond the nation-state. It’s a place where all people, all minorities, and all genders are equally represented." Also during her tenure, Yousef pursued the policy of "co-governance" which, as she explained in an interview, ensures that "every position at every level of government in Rojava . . . includes a female equivalent of equal authority."
In March 2016, Yousef was elected co-president of the Rojava federation. The federation covered about 16 percent of Syria's land area. In an interview upon her election, Yousef described the mission of the committee as creating "a wider and more comprehensive system" in the areas liberated from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) "that [gives] rights to all the groups to represent themselves and to form their own administrations."
Referring to the principle of co-governance's attempt to ensure that Syria is government so as to include the country's many ethnic groups (predominantly Arabs and Kurds), Abdulsalem Mohammed said that "Hediya [Yousef] represents Rojava and [Mansur] Selam represents northern Syria." Mohammed, a Kurdish teacher and activist from Qamishli, added that “This is based on the principle of our co-chair system and different nations, and equality between women and men."
...
Wikipedia