I saw Avengers 2: Age of Ultron last week with my sister. I was looking forward to seeing this sequel for a long while.
I loved the first movie. Action is my genre and there’s just something amazing about watching impossible maneuvers by these heroes saving the planet. It is one of the biggest movies to hit the screens this summer.
However all throughout the movie I had this sinking feeling inside because I knew there was something even more complex …something even more real playing not in a theatre close to us but in the war ravaged countries of the Middle East
The story that I am talking about involves an organization known as the ISIS – or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Map of Syria and Iraq and key areas
Since 2014, this group has advanced rapidly in the region of Iraq and Syria throwing it in chaos. The UN has held it responsible for human right abuses and war crimes and Amnesty International has also reported on its ethnic cleansing.
The goal of this group is to establish a caliphate under its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that claims religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide.
Four million people have fled Syria. Another two million Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes to escape the fighting.
Almost 60 countries are at war directly or indirectly with ISIS and its brutality is splashed all across the Internet.
Unlike other organizations, which claim some reason for their heinous acts – (even Bin Laden tried to rationalize the attack against the USA) ISIS doesn’t justify itself.
Their cruelty and viciousness have included beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, burying victims alive and ethnic cleansing.
The only reason they have is to terrorize their enemies and impress the world. They want to shock the world and awe it with its savageness.
Anything in their way, they destroy
Their savagery has even got them more recruits according to a few commentators.
Except they didn’t count for an obstacle like this that would stand in their way…
The hands of a Kurdish woman fighter
The Kurdish fighters who are bravely taking the fight to ISIS and what’s more they are doing it with women by their side.
There are all women combat units that have grown to almost 10,000 women.
The Kurdish fighters are right there at the frontline battling for their homelands and what’s more freedom – in every form.
These women are picking up arms against these ISIS militants who preach that women should never leave their homes unless necessary.
According to an anonymous woman fighter interviewed by a reporter on joining the war, “ if we don’t do it, who else will?”
Many of them have lost their lives at the siege of Kobane . There are 17 and 18 year old girls picking up arms too.
A young woman soldier poses for a photograph for TIME
Zilan Orkesh is an 18 year old who had left her village to join the YPJ
When she killed an ISIS fighter for the first time, she began cheering loudly, hoping the sound would reach the ears of other jihadis. “I wanted to let them know that their worst nightmare had come true,” she says. “Their friend had been killed by a woman.”
For these women, it’s not just avenging their lands but a fight for their own identities. Their fearlessness and their refusal to cower under those who seek to terrorize all in their way is astounding.
ISIS seeks to oppress women, even using rape as a weapon and here are women fighting to stop them.
Their bravery and their spirit is beyond anything.
I had tears in my eyes as I read articles and glimpsed photographs of these men and women.
Air strike at Kobane
Painting the tombstone of fighter
Women fighters at Kobane
They have lost almost everything.
Somehow even the antics of Captain America failed to compare to them.
I liked the movie for sure… but this was just too raw, too real and too amazing.
In this story there is no hi-fi technology, no superpowers and there may not even be a happy ending.
There is though the indomitable bravery and spirit of men and women for whom brutality is now an everyday occurrence and hope even far ahead.
It is real. So very real.
I salute them and I hope we keep them in our prayers.
Peace.
All photographs from here are sourced from the Internet. I heavily researched articles from BBC News and TIME.
The Semifeminist 