Sinjar Mountain, Iraq — With the setting sun turning mountain slopes and dry fields into amber, a Yazidi girl struggles to launch a rocket propelled grenade.
Her superior and classmates egg her on, but the exercise is sapping the strength of Tolhenden, a stocky 15-year-old with a gold tooth.
“Steady, steady – fix your target,” her instructor says from a short but safe distance.
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It doesn’t go smoothly. The first rocket fails to launch. When she tires and lowers her weapon, the instructor rushes over to adjust her rocket and posture. He switches the missile, imparts a few more words of encouragement, and retreats as his pupil braces to fire.
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A deafening bang and swoosh are the sounds of success.
“I can’t hear anything anymore! My head hurts,” shouts Tolhenden, scrambling down a dirt mount, clearing the way for two other Yazidi women nested on rooftops to unleash their own salvos. The adrenaline rush immediately wipes out any trace of fatigue. “I want to do it again,” she tells her fellow trainees. “It’s easy.”
This is what the military training of Yazidi women and girls looks like today in the ghost villages of Sinjar, the northern Iraqi mountain where a year ago the so-called Islamic State’s brutal massacres of this small religious minority galvanized the world’s attention and set in motion the creation of a US-led anti-IS coalition.
The training, under the supervision of veteran PKK-linked Kurdish fighters, holds out to the Yazidis the possibility of revenge for the IS massacres of their men and enslavement of their women and girls. But it also offers the opportunity for revolutionary change in traditional Yazidi society.
Read more:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/1002/Military-training-offers-Yazidi-women-chance-to-fight-back-taste-of-freedom
