In Syria, female fighters fill out the front lines for a Kurdish militia that is locked in a bitter battle with rebels linked to al-Qaeda. They say they’re sending a message: “When you fight against them, the first thing you think about is the freedom of women.”
Nojin, a 20-year-old fighter from northern Syria, has been a soldier since the country erupted into civil war.
She is an ethnic Kurd, the country's largest minority group at 10% of the population. Based predominately in northeast Syria, near the borders with Turkey and Iraq, the Kurds have pushed to keep out of the conflict, saying they don't trust either side. And they've relied on their powerful local militia — known for deploying men and women alike to the front lines — to enforce that demand.
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Rebels linked to al-Qaeda are pushing to expand into Kurdish territory, sparking months of clashes. The fighting brought Nojin to a military post outside the city of Ras al-Ain, the last Kurdish checkpoint before area controlled by extremists.
Sitting at the post one recent afternoon, Nojin, who declined to give her surname, said her motivation as a fighter was simple: "The freedom of our land." But she also conceded another objective for facing down the jihadis: "When you fight against them the first thing you think about is the freedom of women."
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About 15 fighters were manning the post that afternoon, most of them women.
Though the Kurds are on the upswing, winning a series of important strategic victories of late, the soldiers said they remained locked in a bitter battle — one for ideology as well as territory. "These groups want to build a radical Islamic system here," said Serhat Aso, a male fighter at the checkpoint. "And we are in the 21st century. No one will accept this."
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The 29-year-old woman running the checkpoint wore a rifle slung over her shoulder and a braided ponytail running down past her waist.
She asked not to be photographed, citing safety concerns, but gave the name Berwelat Dunya, and that she was from a Kurdish town near Aleppo. Dunya said that when the fighting began, she'd been wary of facing al-Qaeda, having heard that "their fighters were the strongest in the world." But after killing her first, she said, she looked down at the dead body and thought, These are just normal people.
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