In one of the best stories you’ll here today. Northern Iraqi Yazidi women are banding together to form a fighting-unit to take on ISIS – risking rape, abuse and death.
Thousands of Yazidi women have been abducted and forced into sexual slavery. There are currently 123 women who have joined the ranks, aged 17-30.
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Even the youngest is undaunted by the risks in what she is doing. She had this to say:
“Even if they kill me, I will say I am a Yazidi…My father was so happy when I had told him I had joined this union… Before I was scared, now I cannot be scared of them. Any second they tell us to fight ISIS I am ready.”
The founder, Xeta Shingali, is a folk singer in northern Iraq but recently was trained by Kurdish fighters to fire and use AK47s. This is her in the photo below.
Xeta says her army and the Peshmerga desperately need help from the west: ‘We have had only basic training and we need more… But we are ready to fight ISIS anytime.’
She is asking western nations to send weapons and airplanes. As for Arabs that join ISIS? Xeta’s 24 year old deputy Adiba Sido doesn’t mince words:
‘The Arabs who joined ISIS betrayed us. We will not let that happen again, they are not human… We are here to avenge and to defend our land.’
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From the Daily Mail:
The women of an all-female Yazidi batallion is risking death – or worse – to fight back against the ISIS thugs who abducted, raped or murdered thousands of their people.
They were brought together by a renowned Yazidi s nger Xate Shingali, who formed the ‘Sun Girls’ batallion to take on Islamic State on the battlefield in Iraq.
If her troops are ever caught by the enemy, they will either be killed or, more likely, be held by the extremists as their personal sex slaves.
Even the youngest, just 17, brushes off that terrifying prospect, adding: ‘Even if they kill me, I will say I am a Yazidi.’
ISIS kidnapped thousands of Yazidi women and very young girls when it stormed their villages in Sinjar province, northern Iraq, in August 2014.
Those who escaped from their clutches have told of how they endured unimaginable cruelty and sexual abuse at the hands of the ISIS fighters they were forced to marry.
Should the U.S. be doing more to help groups like this in northern Iraq? Why hasn’t more aid gotten to them? Sound off in the comments below!
