The US army announced its first female active-duty sniper in December. But in some parts of the world, women have long been crucial members of deadly sniper cells.
During the Iran-Iraq war, a couple fled Kurdish Iran, giving birth to a baby girl in a refugee camp in Iraq. Three years later, they made a home in Scandinavia, raising their child in the Danish countryside. That little girl Joanna Palani grew up to become a fiercely independent, politically idealistic woman. Some two decades since her parents’ departure from their homeland, Joanna, a high school student, left the safety of home to join in the Kurdish fight against ISIS.
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Over the last week, yet another fake news headline has been making the rounds on social media. “Cute girl slays 100 ISIS fighters, you won’t believe what happens next!” This news item was already clichéd during the heyday of ISIS clickbait articles back in 2015. Now it is just getting embarrassing to watch people share these stories.
Joanna Palani is a Danish citizen of Kurdish extraction, having been born in a refugee camp in Ramadi in 1993. Emigrating to Denmark when she was three, Palani told The Guardian that the traveled to Syria to, “to fight for women’s rights, for democracy – for the European values I learned as a Danish girl.” Palani did in fact travel to northern Syria, called Rojava by the Kurds, where she joined the YPJ militia.