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.

Warren Buffett: What Most Investors Don't Understand About Risk

Dividing whole numbers by 10 | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

View All

Worked example: Predicting whether a precipitate forms by comparing Q and Kₛₚ | Khan Academy

[Instructor] For this problem, our goal is to figure out whether or not a precipitate will form if we mix 0.20 liters of a 4.0 times 10 to the negative third Molar solution of lead two nitrate with 0.80 liters of an 8.0 times 10 to the negative third Mola…

Biogeochemical cycles | Ecology | Khan Academy

Talk a little bit about biogeochemical cycles. The term “biogeochemical” sounds very fancy, but really these are just cycles that involve different molecules that are essential for life and how they circulate through an ecosystem. And really, how they cir…

What Does It REALLY Mean To Do Things That Don't Scale? – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel

The moment I remember on my first test ride on Cruise that I’ll never forget is we’re driving down 101, and Kyle says, “Oh, a shadow! Let’s see how the car handles that.” And it was like, “Oh, Kyle! Hey, this is Michael Cybel with Dalton Caldwell, and to…

Lightcone: Consumer is back, What’s getting funded now, The vibes immaculate

It feels like there’s more energy around this batch than there has been for as long as I can remember for any YC batch. Like, what do you think’s happening? There’s a platform shift, and this is the moment where every single SAS dollar in the world is up …

Sign of average rate of change of polynomial | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy

So we are given this function h of x, and we’re asked over which interval does h have a positive average rate of change. So, like always, pause this video and have a go at it before we do this together. All right, now let’s work through this together. To…

15 Lessons That Take The Longest to Learn

You don’t have as much time as you think you have. Some incredibly important lessons become obvious only in retrospect, but you learn them the hard way. This video is your unique opportunity to learn these lessons now so you can benefit from them for the …

Band of Sisters | Explorer

More Articles