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.

The Ponzi Factor | Stocks are NOT Ownership Instruments

BONUS: History of the possessive apostrophe | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

View All

Travel INSIDE a Black Hole

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today we are going to go inside a black hole. It’s not going to be comfortable, but it will be pretty fun. Now, first thing’s first: mathematically speaking, anything could become a black hole if you were to compress it int…

Pitch Practice with Paul Buchheit and Sam Altman at Startup School SV 2016

All right, so up next we’re going to do pitch practice. This is something that we invented by accident a couple of years ago. One of our speakers had to cancel at the last minute, so we just threw together this idea: let’s bring up some startups. This is …

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: The Investment Opportunity of a Generation

I see AI presenting transformational opportunities. It may be the technology that can bring down the inflation. AI is fundamentally altering the economy and creating a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity. These aren’t my words; this is coming from…

15 Personal Finance Lessons Everyone Wishes They Knew Sooner

You know how they say it’s never too late? Well, that’s not entirely true, right? Sometimes it is too late, and you do not want to be that person who has that kind of realization. A survey by Bankrate found that 57% of people in the US feel behind on thei…

Halloween and Neil deGrasse Tyson | StarTalk

I was never big into Halloween costumes. When I was a child, I had a costume, but I didn’t have so much invested in what it was or what it looked like that it became a part of my childhood memories. I grew up; my formative years were in a huge apartment …

There Is Something Hiding Inside Earth

We’ve found a new planet, home to octillions of the most extreme beings living in the most absurd and deadly hellscape. In absolute darkness, crushed by the weight of mountains, starved of oxygen, cooked alive, bathed in acid, salt or radiation. And yet, …

Band of Sisters | Explorer

More Articles