http://www.timesofoman.com/News/39736/Article-Kurdish-female-peshmerga-confront-Islamic-State-rebels Tekoshin stands on a mountain in north Iraq with a rifle slung over her shoulder and a grenade tucked into her belt, facing extremists in "a struggle to liberate women". Women have been fighting alongside men in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to wrest Mount Makhmur in northern Iraq back from Islamic State (IS) extremists, whose treatment of women makes the fight especially personal for the dozens of female fighters on the mountain. 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". "They don't allow women in areas under their control to go to the market" and force them to wear headscarves, she says. "Our struggle against (the IS) is to defend women from them and from that kind of thinking." Some 50 women are among the fighters on the mountain from the PKK, which launched an insurgency for self-rule in Turkey in 1984 and has been listed as a terrorist group by countries including the United States, but began peace talks in 2012. 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 extremists. "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. "But when it comes to fighting, we break up and we and the men deploy together on different fronts." Kurdish women have fought alongside men for years in the PKK, its Syrian offshoot the People's Protection Units (YPG), and to a lesser extent, the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces.

• published: 15 Sep 2014
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