The Women Who Took on ISIS: A Conversation with Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Author, The Daughters of Kobani

Please join the Center for Strategic and International Studies for a Smart Women, Smart Power celebration of International Women’s Day featuring New York Times best-selling author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. She will discuss her new book, The Daughters of Kobani (2021), her best-selling book Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015), which is being made into a major motion picture, and her extensive research and experience covering the women who serve and live in conflict-affected areas of the world.

The Daughters of Kobani tells the story of what ISIS has left in its wake: the most far-reaching experiment in women’s equality in the least likely place in the world brought to you by young women who have been battling ISIS town by town, street by street since 2013. These young women served as America’s ground force in the fight to defeat the Islamic State. The Daughters of Kobani tells, for the first time, the story of how they came to serve as America’s partner.

Lemmon serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, along with private sector leadership roles in emerging technology and national security. She began writing about entrepreneurship in conflict and post-conflict zones while studying for her MBA at Harvard following a decade covering politics for the ABC News Political Unit. This work from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Liberia, Bosnia and beyond has been published by the World Bank, Harvard Business School, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and CNN, among others. Following her MBA studies, she led public policy analysis during the global financial crisis at the global investment firm PIMCO.

This event is made possible through support from Citi.

Event Partners