Real J, and Facebook, reminded me that today is International Women’s Day. One group of women that has not gotten the attention that they deserve are the very brave Yazidi women who have joined the Kurdish women fighting ISIS. Take a look:
This “Force of the Sun Ladies” has gotten predictably little coverage from the American media, but in October, when they were still undergoing training, CNN reported that,
The trainee soldiers say they joined up “to save our family, our city, our body — to save ourselves. People want to kill us, and we want to save ourselves.”
They say they have been profoundly changed by what ISIS did to their homeland, and their people — and that they are determined to make the militants pay.
“I am the sister of the girls you captured, the daughter of the mothers you hold,” one says, in a message for ISIS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
“I am not the same person I was the day Daesh entered Sinjar. I am Peshmerga. I wait to fight, and to liberate our sisters and mothers from your dirty hands.”
And they insist they are not afraid of what they may face on the battlefield: “We are not scared,” says one. “We will be very happy to wear the Peshmerga uniform.”
[Commander Xate] Shingali, too, insists she doesn’t think about the risk of dying or being injured; she has one aim — to bring those kidnapped by ISIS and subjected to brutal rape and horrific abuse home safely.
“One day you will get back to your family,” she vows to the missing. “We won’t give up.”
In the video above, these fighters call on the West to provide the supplies that they need. I hope their request is taken seriously.
