Thanks for the hint. I used a search engine and found the story from PBS and The Atlantic. PBS here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/fema...

And this from "Voice of America".
"Also entering the struggle against the Islamic State are fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party, a militant Kurdish wing that has been designated as a terrorist group for its decades-long fight against neighboring Turkey. The PKK fighters, which include a number of combat-experienced women, are credited with having helped Yazidi refugees escape the Islamic State onslaught."
http://www.voanews.com/content/kurdish-f...

Images are also easy to find:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia...
http://gdb.voanews.com/C1E8FA6D-91AA-4E4...
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/06/2...

(It is of course absolutely true that if an ISIS fighter is killed by a woman he will not go to heaven.)

The Kurds are in it to win it.. Near as I can tell they are about as close as we will get to a group of moderates in the region. By moderate I mean they are not all that interested in establishing a religious state. Kurdistan has been doing a pretty good job of being a pretty safe place for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Our biggest mistake of the early 90's was not air lifting in heavy weapons for them to take their land back from Iraq and Turkey. I think that back then we were being pressured to not piss off the Turks by Turkey and Europe. Now, its nice to see after a long time of being marginalized that the Kurds are done taking it and are by all appearances more than willing to fight for their own survival.

The Kurds are an ethnic group, not a religious minority. These women from the PKK are nominally communists: PKK Party Wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_W...

Note that since being captured, their leader has abandoned Marxism-Leninism and become a "libertarian socialist".

On the "enemy of my enemy" theory, the USA could have allied better with the USSR than wooing religionist groups in the Arab/Islamic lands. Dislike it as we do, Marxism is nonetheless all about industrial production, science, and equality. Consider Afghanistan 1980, with the USA and USSR not get along well at it but being there to bring western secular ideas, education, technology, etc. Instead, President Reagan brought the Taliban into the White House.

Too many pop-ups hotlinking spam. If you have an actual opinion piece to post and an actual opinion about it, please rationalize the denominator.