Kurdish fighters fighting ISIS desperately want more weapons and ammunition, but they already have a secret weapon: The extremists they are fighting fear that if they get killed in a battle against a woman, they will go straight to hell.
“They have many female battalions, as you know who fought very bravely,” said Ed Royce, who chairs the House International Relations Committee.
“These ISIS 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.
“And these female soldiers were expressing their satisfaction with the fact that they had taken the fight to ISIL and had stopped the advance, turned back the advance — killed a number of these fighters, who would then run away,” he added.
Women have long fought in Kurdish peshmerga forces, who have been fighting the ISIS in northern Iraq and in the Kurdish areas of Syria.
Some women who had fled the oppression of ISIS have been organized into special Women’s Protection Units in Syria.
Radical imams have invoked interpretations of Quran passages to recruit jihadists, promising them paradise and 72 virgins if they die in battle or in "a martyrdom operation."
Seeing a woman staring at them down the barrel of a machine gun isn’t what they had in mind.
Some women joined resistance units after ISIS slaughtered neighbors and relatives and forced them to flee their homes.
But now, the fighters — and Kurdistan’s government — are calling for more help, as the US ramps up aid to the Free Syrian Army and other forces.