Meet the gun-toting women waging a fierce war against ISIS

 

Tales of the men fighting the battle raging in Mosul between Iraqi forces and the fighters of IS are myriad. But elsewhere in Northern Iraq, a group of women warriors are making a defiant stand against the Islamist State.

These Iranian Kurdish women fighters hold a desert position in northern Iraq, and IS hit's them regularly with mortars. Their response? Singing through loudspeakers. Then they let rip with machine gun fire.

Like Wonder Woman's Amazonian tribe, these women are band of sisters, battle-hardened and fighting for a cause they truly believe in; protecting the land and those they love. 

"We wanted to make them angry. To tell Daesh that we are not afraid," Mani Nasrallahpour, 21, one of about 200 female peshmerga fighters, who left behind their life in Iran to take on the hardline Sunni militants, told Reuters.

A commander said Islamic State -- known to its enemies by the Arabic acronym Daesh -- deliberately targeted the female unit with 20 mortars when the singing began.

Islamic State prohibits singing and music. It has also imposed tight restrictions on women and took hundreds of them as sex slaves since sweeping through northern Iraq in 2014 and declaring a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

The Kurdish women are part of a larger armed unit of some 600 fighters aligned with the Kurdistan Freedom Party, known by its Kurdish acronym PAK.

This group has joined an array of Iraqi and Kurdish forces who are backed by a US-led coalition in an offensive designed to push Islamic State out of their stronghold of Mosul.

It also has a far more ambitious goal of creating an independent Kurdish nation that would stretch across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria -- a concept those nations reject.

"We fight to protect our soil, whether it is the Kurdistan of Iran or Iraq. It does not matter whether it is Daesh or another group that has occupied our soil," said Nasrallahpour, clutching an AK-47 assault rifle.

Their presence is a reminder of the complexities of the battlefield in northern Iraq, where the women recently joined Iraqi male Kurdish fighters in driving Islamic State out of the village of Fadiliya.

Avin Vaysi ran into that fight toting a heavy machinegun and battling Islamic State street by street.

"They are afraid of women," she said. "It is true that Daesh is dangerous but we are not afraid of them."

So far in the offensive, one woman fighter from the group has been killed.