The Women Fighters Taking on ISIS

ERBIL, Iraq - As the Islamic State fighters tore through northern Iraq in a murderous rampage, the women were called to come down from the mountains. One woman known as Ozlem, a longtime fighter with a Kurdish guerrilla group, was sent to defend Makhmour, a town where some 12,000 Kurds had taken refugee. Ozlem, whose nom de guerre means “to be missed,” eagerly left to confront the enemy - the radical Islamic group also known as ISIS or ISIL. “We knew what they did in Sinjar,” Ozlem said, referring to the recent slaughter of civilians from the Yazidi minority sect, whose surviving members fled into a forbidding mountain range in northern Iraq before.