Band of Sisters | Explorer

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

The Peshmerga number roughly 150,000, and they're revered in Kurdish society. When ISIS first attacked, they were taken by surprise and driven back in some places. Since those early days, they've transformed themselves into a powerful fighting force—one of the few in the region that's been able to stop the militants.

As I follow this story deeper into Kurdistan, it's what I find next that leaves the strongest impression: a band of sisters who've taken up arms to defend their people. This is also their fight, and as women, they've got the most to lose. On the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah, this female-only battalion has its headquarters.

I meet them at a firing range where raw recruits practice target shooting. I watch as the soldiers dig through crates of loose ammunition, load their magazines, and gather at the firing line. Their fingers twitch on the triggers as they wait for the order to fire.

Most of these women never expected to be fighters, but if ever there was a time to take up arms, it's now. Before they even fired a shot, weapons started to break. Within ten minutes, we had seven AKs lying on the ground that had broken, jammed, or become unusable in one way or another.

How is standing there next to me, and he just looks at it and sighs, and says, "How can we fight ISIS with this?" But they don't have a choice. When I ask each of these soldiers, she says she is ready to die for Kurdistan.

Worked example: Product rule with table | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Introduction by Kirsty Nathoo

View All

Interpreting direction of motion from position-time graph | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

An object is moving along a line. The following graph gives the object’s position relative to its starting point over time. For each point on the graph, is the object moving forward, backward, or neither? So pause this video and try to figure that out. A…

Is Sargassum Attracting Sharks to Galveston? | SharkFest

NARRATOR: Bull sharks bite with more force, pound for pound, than any other species of large shark. But in Texas waters, they don’t frequently turn their teeth on humans. That is, until 2010—three attacks in less than a year. The safety and livelihood of …

How to make 2024 the best year of your life

3 2 1 New Year’s resolutions. The helpful tool, or a stressful mandate that society seems to expect of us every year? Probably both! If you’re like me, you think about making a list of what you want to accomplish or the type of person you want to become …

3D Photographs Of Things We Have Lost

Just a few years after this photograph was taken, the quagga, a subspecies of zebra, was hunted to extinction. This is actually one of the final two photographs ever taken of the quagga; the other was taken at the exact same moment, just a few inches to t…

Introduction to exponential decay

What we’re going to do in this video is quickly review exponential growth and then use that as our platform to introduce ourselves to exponential decay. So let’s review exponential growth. Let’s say we have something that… and I’ll do this on a table here…

The #1 PROBLEM with Betterment Investing

What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So lately there’s been a very big focus towards investment apps and high interest savings accounts that offer you a pretty substantial value for what it is. Like, at first we had a lie bank with their 2.2 percent int…

Band of Sisters | Explorer

More Articles