WASHINGTON — Kurdish fighters battling ISIS desperately want more guns and armor, but they already have a secret weapon: The fanatics they’re fighting fear that if they get killed in combat by a woman, they won’t go to heaven.
“They have many female battalions, as you know who fought very bravely,” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), who chairs the House International Relations Committee, told The Post of the Kurds.
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ISIS militants are afraid they won’t go to heaven if they are killed by a woman.Photo: Reuters
Royce, who met this week with the foreign minister of Kurdistan, cited recent reports ofyoung female Kurdish troops “laughing” at ISIS forces they had turned back.
“These ISIL soldiers apparently believed that if they were killed in battle, they went to paradise as long as they were killed by a man,” Royce explained, using another acronym for the terror group.
“And these female soldiers were communicating their satisfaction with the fact that they had taken the fight to ISIL and had stopped the advance, turned back the advance — slayed a number of these fighters, who would then run away,” he added with a chuckle.
Women have long fought in Kurdish peshmerga forces, who have been battling ISIS in northern Iraq and in Kurdish areas of Syria.
A 27-year-old female Kurdish fighter named Tekoshin fighting in northern Iraq recently gloated to AFP: “I think [ISIS] were more afraid of us than of the men.” The Kalashnikov-toting fighter added: “They believe they’ll go to hell if they die at a woman’s hands.”
Some women who have fled the brutal oppression of ISIS have been organized into special Women’s Protection Units in Syria to do battle.
Hend Hasen Ahmed, a 26-year-old female fighter in Syria’s Kurdish region, told Britain’s Telegraph during the ISIS siege of Mt. Sinjar: “We are being trained to use snipers, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades … For myself and for my people, I will go to [Mount] Sinjar to either die or live there freely.”
Radical imams have invoked interpretations of Koran passages to recruit jihadists, promising them a trip to paradise and 72 brown-eyed virgins if they die in battle or in what’s considered a martyrdom operation.
Seeing a woman staring at them down the barrel of a machine gun apparently isn’t what they had in mind.
Some women joined resistance units after ISIS brutes slaughtered neighbors and relatives and forced them to flee their homes.
But now, the fighters — and Kurdistan’s government — are pleading for more help, as the US ramps up aid to the Free Syrian Army and other forces.
Royce said the Kurdish regional foreign minister, Falah Mustafa Bakir, contacted him three weeks ago to complain that 190,000 Kurdish troops still don’t have the anti-tank missiles and long-range mortars that they need to defeat ISIS.
“The point the foreign minister was making to us is that his battalions — male and female — need to be equipped to handle the armor and the artillery” that ISIS has captured, said Royce.
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