The Girl Who Ran Away to Fight ISIS
Joanna Palani was only 22 when she left her comfortable life as a college student behind in Denmark to join up as a YPG and Peshmerga fighter on the frontlines of the war in Iraq and Syria. She tells us how ISIS soldiers are "easy to kill," but Assad's troops are much harder.
Left to right: Joanna Palani with a traditional scarf she wore while fighting, and Palani in civilian attire. Photos by Sarah Buthmann
by Lara Whyte
INTERVIEW
MAY 25 2016
Of the some 750 young European women embarking on adventures to Syria and Iraq, only a handful have managed to return home safely. The call of holy war to defeat the butchery of the 45-year Assad regime in Syria has inspired more than 27,000 foreign fighters from 81 different countries to join the conflict, the vast majority of whom now fight with ISIS.
Most of the women and girls who have travelled to the battle have done so at the grooming of ISIS recruiters. Joanna Palani, a 23-year-old politics and philosophy student from Copenhagen, went to fight for the Kurds; first for the People's Protection Unit in Syria (the YPG) and then the Peshmerga, the Western-trained and backed army of the Kurdish Regional Government. The Peshmerga (Kurdish for "one who stands in front of death"
are credited with playing a role in both the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the capture of Osama Bin Laden, and are gaining significant if slow victories over ISIS in Iraq.
Palani, the daughter and grand-daughter of Peshmerga fighters, is an Iranian Kurd who was born in a UN refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq in 1993, after the family were forced to flee their home during the Gulf War. They moved to Copenhagen when she was a toddler. She lived a "normal, comfortable life" with her family. Her favourite hobbies growing up were reading and target practice; after firing her first live rifle in Finland aged nine, she got obsessed.
"I love it," she says, "it is my life. It is very normal for Kurds to learn to use weapons like this." Palani speaks perfect English with an American accent, laughs frequently during sentences, and endearingly refers to me as ma'am.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/joanna-palani-syria-iraq-ran-away-fight-isis
