The women’s umbrella organisation in North-East Syria, Kongra Star, released a statement paying tribute to Meredith Tax, a prominent activist and writer of second-wave feminism, who passed away on September 25.

The Kongra Star statement on Wednesday includes the following:

“With great sadness we have learned of the death of our dear friend and sister Meredith Tax after a long fight with cancer. We want to express our heartfelt condolences to her family and friends.

Although Meredith has been taking her place in the feminist movement since the 1960s, our paths have crossed together with the Rojava Revolution. The revolutionary process based on women’s liberation, grassroots democracy and ecology in Rojava and North and East Syria impressed her so much that she started to actively support the revolution. In this sense, she has written the book A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State in order to bring attention to the Kurdish struggle for freedom led by women in the USA and worldwide. Furthermore, she has written numerous articles on the situation in Rojava and Kurdistan, the attacks against the revolution and especially the women’s liberation movement.

Meredith Tax was co-founder of the North America Rojava Alliance and of the Emergency Committee for Rojava. Within the committee, she organised not just solidarity and protest actions for Rojava but at the same time informed the public about the current situation there, put pressure on politicians, won new friends and supporters for the Kurdish liberation cause, and organised concrete solidarity. She did this despite her health situation.

We have come to know Meredith as a very experienced but modest intellectual activist. Her wisdom reflected decades of political, practical and theoretical work within the women’s movement. And she was ready to share all her knowledge with women in Kurdistan and worldwide while at the same time continuing to learn from other experiences.

As mentioned above, our ways have crossed and linked in the women’s revolution, which makes her memory even more meaningful for us. We will greatly miss her. But we are conscious that the most meaningful and valuable way of commemorating is to realise our common dreams and hopes.

The same day we received the news of Meredith’s death, the Turkish state conducted armed drone and mortar attacks in Rojava, killing four and injuring five people, including children. One of the civilians that were killed in these attacks is Zeynep Saroxan Mihemed, co-chair of the Justice Department of the Jazeera Region Autonomous Administration and former chair of the Women’s Department. These targeted killings, which constitute another war crime by the Turkish state, make us feel deep anger. But they make us again and again aware of the urgent need to stop the attacks on our revolution by building a huge wall of international support and solidarity in defence of Rojava.

This is what Meredith Tax worked for without getting tired and this is what we will continue to do – more powerful, determined, with great anger and revolutionary morale.”