PICS: Kurdish Female Fighting ISIS

Women have been fighting alongside men in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to wrest Mount Makhmur in northern Iraq back from Islamic State (IS) jihadists, whose treatment of women makes the fight especially personal for the dozens of female fighters on the mountain.?Text: AFP

IS-led militants have overrun large areas of Iraq, and the group also controls significant territory in neighbouring Syria, enacting its harshly restrictive and brutal interpretation of Islamic law in both countries.

Tekoshin, 27, says she and other women are fighting the group not only because of the threat it poses to Kurds but because it 'is against women's liberation'.

Tekoshin stands on a mountain in north Iraq with a rifle slung over her shoulder and a grenade tucked into her belt, facing jihadists in 'a struggle to liberate women'.

At the entrance to the mountain town of Makhmur, 'The Islamic State' was scrawled on a one-storey concrete house, but hastily painted over since the PKK took it back.

Tekoshin says women fought side by side with the men in the battle to force out the jihadists.

'We usually organise ourselves in groups of four women, and I command one of the groups,' she explained, wearing traditional Kurdish clothing usually seen on men.

While Tekoshin says she fights best with her Kalashnikov assault rifle, Saria, 18, shyly says she feels equally comfortable with both light and heavy machineguns and sniper rifles.

Saria grew up in northern Syria, and her two brothers and her sister are currently fighting against IS there, she says, adding that both her parents were in the PKK.