One woman known as Ozlem, a longtime fighter with a Kurdish guerrilla group, was sent to defend Makhmour, a town where some 12,000 Kurds had taken refugee. Ozlem, whose nom de guerre means “to be missed,” eagerly left to confront the enemy -- the radical Islamic group also known as ISIS or ISIL. “We knew what they did in Sinjar,” Ozlem said, referring to the recent slaughter of civilians from the Yazidi minority sect, whose surviving members fled into a forbidding mountain range in northern Iraq before. “We came to Makhmour with so much aggression against ISIS,” she said. For days, they heard how the Islamic State was advancing toward Makhmour, their black banner giving the fighters the appearance of a marauding army conjured up from a medieval past. Then, the fighters arrived. For the next 76 hours, Ozlem along with the rest of the Kurdish forces, battled the militants for control of the town, the women participating alongside the men in combat, as members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK) has always done. In firefights with bearded, black-clad men, she came close enough to notice they were fighting in sandals and seemed apparently unconcerned with death. “In clashes with other enemies, soldiers defended themselves, because life was important to them,” Ozlem said. “You usually lay down and shoot from the ground or from behind something. They were standing up -- exposed -- and shooting.” Ozlem and other women who were part of the battle say they took special pleasure in fighting the notorious radicals whose barbarism, especially towards women, has left a scuttlebutt trail in every town they have taken. “Theyre the enemy of women, but not only women,” Ozlem said. “Theyre the enemy of the entire region and entire world.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:52:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015