Just a few weeks into the US-led airstrike campaign against Daesh in Syria last September, Kurdish militia YPG was barely holding off the militants in Syria’s Kobani.
Scenes coming out of the Kurdish border town were gruesome. Militants stormed the streets and locked into fierce clashes with the YPG, while gun-wielding Kurdish grannies banded together into makeshift civilian armies. Meanwhile, gritty photos circulated Daesh-affiliated social media accounts showing the severed heads of captured Kurdish fighters.
YPG commanders were desperately calling on the US and Turkey to bulk up weapons support for a deteriorating situation on the ground.
Then one day in early October, a female YPJ commander clashed with militants on the outskirts of the border town, before detonating a grenade on herself and the militants that surrounded her.
The event is widely regarded as the first suicide attack to be carried out by the Kurds in the conflict’s four-year span.
Activists diverge on whether the young commander used the grenade to avoid capture or in a planned attack. But it became a symbol of the Kurdish struggle against Daesh, and the strong presence of Kurdish women on the battlefield.
With many Kurdish militias featuring women on the frontlines alongside men, these are the ladies who have come to own the fight against Daesh.
In Aleppo Kurdish soldiers have been a major influence in the fight against both Daesh and the regime. "We’re not just a pretty picture. We are a way of thinking," YPJ Gen. Narin Afrin told FT Magazine. Here a woman watches government forces through the wall in the central city. (AFP/Dimitar Dilkoff)
