Solin Nirvana on the defiant power of Kurdish hair braids

Solin Nirvana on the defiant power of Kurdish hair braids

In Kurdish culture, a woman's braid is more than just a hairstyle — it symbolises beauty, history, identity, and resistance, and it has even appeared in literature, poetry, and 19th-century Western art, such as painter Frank Insati's No. 24 (1832), depicting a Kurdish woman from Amed. The braid's symbolic weight makes it all the more devastating that a deceased Kurdish fighter from the Women's Protection Units — an all-female force established i…